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robertsloan2 — Macaw
Published: 2006-12-30 21:39:16 +0000 UTC; Views: 3489; Favourites: 16; Downloads: 67
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7" x 10" Derwent Artist Pencils on white Stonehenge paper.This is a detailed bird testing some of ~HOULY1970 's detail techniques rendered in color. Some yellow and yellow ochre and yellow-green shades faded out in the scan, the original is a bit brighter. Greener areas look brighter than golden or yellow-green areas, but on the whole it's fairly cool as it is. I like it. This took several days in three different sessions.
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Comments: 54
Thank you! This one took a lot of work. I love Derwent Artist Pencils for that effect though, they are so good for careful shading on Stonehenge.
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Wow, thank you! I was impressed by the others you faved, some of them took my breath away. Purrrr that is so neat!
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Purr thank you! I was seriously thinking of this one for it, with the graphic-looking title and all. I still have to mat it and haven't decided on which shade of blue or green.
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Thank you! This one is my "style" piece for Derwent Artist Pencils. I combine different brands of colored pencils, and Derwent Artists were the second big set I ever owned -- after decades of fidelity to Prismacolors. I'll be doing something this complex and careful with each of my other new large sets as I come to them, to understand the exact working qualities of each brand and come to know its range. They mix. They all work with each other wonderfully but it helps to know each set for its own strengths and specifics.
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Thanks for the praise Robert.
This has definately got to be one of your most impressive pieces, if not THE most impressive. It's simply stunning. Trust me I know what you mean about the colours not being true to life. I have that problem all the time. Things always look better in real life.
I can't wait to see more like this.
John
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I just got Bart Rulon's Artist's Photo Reference: Songbirds today. It includes as a last section "Other Popular Birds including two varieties of swan, gulls, hummingbirds, an osprey (in two or three pages per type of bird, which makes it wonderful to work from!) and a Bald Eagle. I didn't have any good eagle or hawk references any more, though I used to have a good magazine page peregrine falcon I was very short on bird references. I did this macaw from a calendar that a friend sent me -- a stack of several wildlife calendars from previous years. There weren't many birds in the calendars, but I've got an entire volume of them now including many large birds. And something else I've wanted to try in colored pencils for ages, a two-page spread on grackles. I did one grackle way back early in my gallery, and it's reasonably accurate but not like what I can do when I get a good photo reference -- the photographer managed to get the iridescence of head and neck perfect on them, so I may well do the grackle soon.
Plus most of the larger birds do have that kind of tight focus where I can get the feather structures exactly right. This is going to become an entire series of detailed birds, as well as some quick-painted sumi style watercolor or ink birds now that I finally have the right references. I was considering getting a field book, but the trouble with field books is only one reference per species even if they're photographic. I don't get out of the house enough to do my own photography nor does my new camera have a telephoto lens. But with these in hand I can finally start doing them justice.
I was also looking at my BBC Walking With Dinosaurs screen saver and realized I could improve my dinosaurs tremendously by using some of the bird motion photos in the new reference book and just changing their anatomy to their ancient relatives -- some of the BBC poses reminded me of some of the songbird references immediately. I also had no idea how many brilliantly colored songbirds there are out there, being more used to pigeons, the browner sorts of finches and sparrows. So I'll be going wild with birds in colored pencils and other media!
I am so thrilled you like this one, it sent my heart thumping when you favorited it. Because the style is directly influenced by your large-bird pencil pieces and I strove for your depth of detail in it, slowed down and took my time in several long sessions getting it perfect -- and I succeeded. I'll have to do more in this style.
I also may have less trouble in future with colour dropping because I've got the new sets, and sometimes switching brands on the yellow-greens makes them appear. I am going to be consulting my colour charts on everything that has any yellow-greens or lemon yellow elements in it now, as well as any other colour that gets distorted, because I've got enough choices of brand to always use the pencil that reproduces over the brand that doesn't. I can and will get around that scanner's limitations.
Also doing slower, more detailed works may help while my wrist is recovering, it takes more pausing and waiting till I figure it out to do something like Macaw than other, faster mediums.
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It was my pleasure faving It Robert. an honor actually seeing that I helped influence you're desire to do it in a detailed style.
I'm sure having a reference book will help you as well. Myself I just do google searches of the animals that I want and try to change it enough to make it mine, but I am guilty of not changing some of the great photos that I find.
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I'm starting to get better at changing my great reference photos. It's odd, but sometimes in using photos I do have permission to use as is, I'll wind up changing them around as if I were using something copyrighted that the photographer never heard from me. It's an easy thing to fall into, going exactly from a good photo, but there came a point when I noticed myself making artistic changes either to simplify it or because something else came up while I was working on it that made the photo not right for what I was doing. Like this macaw, which was one of a pair and was at a little of a different angle. It's still realistic enough, but when I looked back at the photo, I'd moved its head.
What I loved on the reference was the way the large overlapping feathers of the back were in fine focus and I could follow their structures and shading so easily. I love the way yours came out like that, but for a while doubted that they were that defined on real birds -- till I started looking at photos of large birds and seeing it. The last time I'd tried doing feathers individually, I'd been repeating stylized feather shapes, using inaccurate heavy outlines and ignoring the angles of them as I moved around the body. You can imagine how clumsy the results were, and after it I started going just for tones and shading. Now I've got a better idea of how to get the details right and do a good value drawing before getting to the color.
My newest reference book is full of birds I want to use. The author, Bart Rulon, filled it with the brightest-colored songbirds I'd ever seen, some of which are also around in my yard. We have a pair of red cardinals and, oddly, according to ~kitten42 we also have a pair of yellow cardinals with similar head shapes and eye streak features but distinctively yellow -- not the female red cardinal where she's brown with a little red detailing but yellow. I'm looking forward to seeing these birds for myself and may paint or draw them once I do, since I might be able to combine their coloration with some poses from the reference book.
It does have an osprey, a bald eagle and a falcon in the Other Favorite Birds section as well as two varieties of swans, but the author didn't go down to Louisiana or anywhere like it and get the blue herons and white egrets that I remember so well. I'm going to have to look online for blue heron references, since one of my goals is to someday do a traditional Louisiana Swamp Painting -- a nice landscape of cypresses dripping with Spanish moss and light coming between them to strike loosely interlaced shallow watercourses and, always, one to several white egrets or blue falcons flying or romping around fishing in it. I saw hundreds of these when I hung out in Jackson Square and never bought any because when I looked at the art, I thought eventually I'd do one.
Now, of course, I don't live there and didn't have a camera when I'd go out of the city anywhere and wind up getting driven past roadside canals full of egrets and herons. I'd see hundreds of them sometimes. Big flocks or just isolated birds every block or two. They liked fishing near the highways in the canals.
Maybe some photographers down there have posted a few of those swamp scenes and roadside herons. I can hope. I can also try doing them from memory and comparing them with other long-legged wading birds, but this is going to take more work than it would've if I'd gotten to this point with my art while I was still living down there. Oh well, I will eventually get it!
I know that some of the paintings actually stuck with me for composition and lighting ideas, but I think it's been so long and there are so many that I won't accidentally wind up copying someone else's Swamp Painting.
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Sounds like a great book Robert.
I've seen some of Bart's paintings. He paints in acrylic and they look almost like paint by number paintings up close, but from a ways back they are almost photogenic.
I want to do a Heron painting someday as well. I know what I'm envisioning in my head. So I'm off to a good start as is. I just need to confirm the bird's pose or birds rather in my case. I'm aiming for a nesting scene with the two adults and perhaps a couple chicks.
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Thanks! You've got me thinking about it again and I'll need to redo my plot outline. Unlike most of my fiction, it needs one and will get retinkered every time I do more research or think of something better than I had. That was something I didn't really get about outlines till recently. Until I thought of them as sketches and changeable, they would depress me. I had too many teachers who'd grade an outline and then insist that the outline be followed exactly to the letter without any changes other than the ones suggested (ordered) by the teacher.
Those usually were without regard to what that change would do to the rest of the essay, and always resulted in lousy writing when I was chicken and tried doing it the way I was supposed to. I eventually started cheating and writing the essay first, then deriving outlines from what I'd written.
I met a lot of professional writers who swore by them, then started finding out that what they really did was outline first, then happily abandon anything in the outline as soon as it met the actual writing. I didn't know you didn't stick to outlines. lol
Bart has examples in both of the photo reference books I've seen -- and yes, they're like that. Up close everything is discrete hard-edged layers of color, he doesn't really blend much with brushwork, but his colors are so well chosen it does become almost photographic. For some reason his exact sky color choice on one of them was annoying, maybe because I hadn't been to the area and seen the sky he painted from. I like his paintings, but yours are so far beyond his that I wouldn't go buying his and putting them on a par with major art supply runs.
Ooh that Heron painting sounds great too. You get so much character into the birds, doing two adults and their chicks will be very cool - and it also breaks the Swamp Painting stereotype, none of the Swamp Paintings had chicks. There will come some time though, when I do a traditional Swamp Painting for myself just to own one and to remember the dozens and hundreds of them that I loved and couldn't choose between because they were all so cool.
I don't care if mine gets a little traditional or even cliche, it means something personal that I lived there and worked there and went down those roads and poked into those wetlands. I have to do at least one very traditional one-to-three egrets flying through the swamp one, but may try also doing one from life if I ever go back: break the romanticism of the Swamp Painting and show the heron in a highway ditch the way they really live near the highways, or a flock of them in a highway ditch seen from the top of the shoulder. It'd take a stop and some camera work and hopefully I could get it without the birds flying away.
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Yeah that's it. Bart has hard edges. See my lack of discriptiveness ... haha ... But yeah it's weird because with mine up close they often look very loose, but back away and things tighten up. His is a simular but different illusion I guess.
Thanks for the complement. Bart Rulon is an Established Wildlife artist. So I consider that a great compliment. Now if I could only market myself better. Haha .... I'm working on it though ... slowly. I have a gallery in upstate New York that will be opening soon and the Owner's a good friend that wants to have my work there.
Also I'm going to take my portfolio to local galleries here to see if it generates any interest. We are getting our new Fancy smancy color printer for the office here to use for all our publicity stuff, So I'll use it to get some of my stuff printed up.
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Bart Rulon may be more established, and he is very good. But in my personal opinion, I like your techniques more and love the intensity of all your nature works. Your self portraits are cool too, very well done and introspective. But what shines is anything you do with animals and birds. There is a stiffness to some of Bart Rulon's pieces that I never find in yours, and you're better at saying more with less in backgrounds. Your compositions focus attention on the animal and its behavior, your birds and animals always seem alive and the entire life story of the creature is implied in the moments you choose. Also in yours there's a subtle pervasive optimism.
Not romanticism or sentimentality, optimism. You highlight the peak times in the bird or animal's life from its point of view, and so both that feeling of peak times in life in all its range of events and that feeling of being out in the wild runs deeper in your works.
Bart Rulon doesn't do the cliche roaring tiger either, but a lot of painters do. The thing with the roaring tiger is that it becomes stressful for a buyer to live with, when the animal in the painting is giving an aggression display or hunting the viewer, that's thrilling -- and belongs in a museum rather than as a daily subliminal sense of your couch painting getting ready to rip out your throat. You do hunting creatures but I've noticed you don't place the viewer in the position of the prey -- my grand lynx drawing is always as if I glanced up out of this window to see the animal in a moment of silent intimacy: the cat is ignoring me in favor of small game that's almost in his reach and I was lucky enough to be at the window while his prey was near, a sense of being immediately there, of the lucky moment of seeing nature up close. I'm involved in the painting, but not in a way that carries subliminal threat to my little grandchildren.
~kitten42 pointed out to me that this was probably why my best pastel paintings didn't sell in New Orleans when my portraits and street scenes were going like hot cakes: most people do not want life sized realistic predators lounging in their homes and it'd irritate them over the long term. I was doing life sized cougars and tigers, not in threat poses but often making direct, challenging eye contact with the viewer.
Descriptiveness is my main profession, thanks for the compliment! I love these discussions because they give me a chance to think about your entire body of work as well as my favorite pieces individually -- what do all of your nature works say? What are your strengths and potential flaws, what are your style habits? You work looser yet you're capable of extreme patience with graphite and meticulously accurate detail. The detail-expert artists I know often share one of my flaws, a tendency if putting in a background to bring every single element of the drawing into tight clear focus.
I did that in Ferns, Moss and Water, but since I got Canadian Lynx and hung it, I realized that the soft billows of shadowed snow and the realistic but not overworked few brambles brought my attention back to the cat again and again. I need to use kelly green Canson paper again when my wrist heals, and try another intimate mossy landscape with drips -- because especially at the edges I could have gone much looser with the vegetation and kept the focus on the animals in a zigzag leading from the foreground little snail and moth through the water curtain to the hidden snake. I might not do exactly that one again, but I know I could do a better version of "intimate mossy landscape with water dripping into it and all the little creatures that live in that micro environment."
For another thing I could use a little more repetition of the tiny moth and other numerous creatures in a composition like that, using it to help unify the drawing and get more environmental realism, more behavioral realism. Not just one each of the types like it's a biology diagram or something. It's good, I got good rendering in it and the colors are very rich, but it has a Rousseau sort of stiffness because of the tight-focus flattened out vine at the top and the overdetailing of background elements. Still gets the idea across but isn't as realistic.
Oh, I hope your local galleries are smart enough to take an interest! Very cool about the high-quality color printer. Could you please give me an idea of what you're planning for layout? If you did a mockup of what you want, it'd be easier to write up the sections for you -- something like an outline - give it in column inches and I can try to calculate word count from there. I get very systematic-journalistic about this sort of thing. Or if you want me to try working up a layout like that and you okay it I can do one. I still owe you for Kestrel, and I want to do the writing as well as you've painted my beautiful bird!
I think focus is the key to why a loose technique with accurate rendering comes off more realistic. Even in good photography, in a macro shot, the central image -- flower, frog, whatever -- is going to be extremely detailed and break down at its finest to pixeling or graining under microscopic examination, it's values and they are minutely shaded. However the farther away from the focal range anything is, the more blurred, both to all sides like peripheral vision and to focal length. The main subject of the photo is going to have the tightest focus and most detail, but when it's rendered loosely on that micro level it creates textural unity and the brushwork or strokes become invisible by attention focus.
Overdetail and things look static. A hard-edged style has buried, jarring unrealism to it, just the way a good textured drawing will come across as "beautiful drawing" rather than "it could be real" a hard-edged painting style screams "this is painted" and a looser one, it's easier to forget that and just pay attention to the subject. It can look very good like any sort of consistent stylized rendering, and realism happens on many levels. But the loose style is a more effective illusion.
Hehehe, you've got me thinking about why I react to some styles the way I do. Impressionism has something to do with this, because as a child I hated Impressionism for looking "sloppy" -- the brush strokes or pastel strokes showed and while you could recognize the subject, up close it looked like a messy mass of juxtaposed colors. Or even cartoonlike with stylized renderings like Van Gogh's stars. I liked realism better and adored the Old Masters and Renaissance painters who seemed to get everything exactly as it really was.
At some point in high school Hodge, my art teacher, explained Impressionism in a way that made sense -- it was loose because the artists painted fast in order to get the light exactly the way it was before it changed. That made sense and I started paying attention to light, then went to the Chicago Art Institute and discovered Caravaggio doing the same cool things with light in the late Renaissance.
Once I got that, I started enjoying the Impressionists and finally started noticing the variety of palettes different Impressionists used. It wasn't till a few years ago that it finally sank in to me that values are what matters and your palette just changes the feel of the picture and sometimes, time of day if it changes the light. I finally connected with why I enjoyed monochrome blue paintings and drawings so much, and understood palettes like that which aren't always realistic but are enjoyable.
I still don't care as much for abstracts or for subjects I don't like, but I've broadened my interests a lot over the years. I think I understand it more. What impresses me in yours is the way your compositions will come out so intensely dramatic and meaningful. Not in some abstracted rules-way of making the picture pretty, but always reinforcing the central subject and that moment of gut-impact intimacy with nature. You lead me on to one of those moments of wonder every time you do a nature piece, it feels like the time you come around a tree and see a hawk perched much nearer than you expected to or the lynx right near the window. Your compositions and chosen poses have a lot to do with that!
So it's very neat and it's fun for me to try to understand where you get this tremendous power to bring me right out of my room into Canada every time I look at them.
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Well Robert it's high praise to be considered to be in Rulon and his peer's class.
I do try to show nature at it's most real. and the life and death stuggles that I occasionally portray don't get more real than that. People can ignore the circle of life, but it happens whether they turn a blind eye or not.
I understand what you mean about the background not needing to be in tight focus. Sometimes people have a hard time getting away from it.
Impressionism is just that for me ... trying to capture what I envision or feel as quickly as I can before the magic has passed. It's part of the problem that I have going back at a later date to work on a painting.
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Oh, no matter how tasteful it is -- and in "The Kill," it is very tastefully rendered -- this drawing is not going to scare my little granddaughter at the sight but it will show her something of nature. I think she knows big cats hunt other animals, but is a bit young for seeing the gore. It's fantastic. I still have to sum up your work with a feeling of unseen intimacy, it's always like one of those privileged moments when you luck and get very close to something very wild that would run or fly off in a heartbeat if you weren't exactly where you were, behind a window or on the other side of a creek or something -- somewhere the animal feels safe and doesn't care if it's observed.
I am one of the worst offenders for tight-focus backgrounds, or I used to be. I'm working at getting away from that and doing more loose backgrounds and simpler compositions. That and applying impressionism to more than people's faces.
I've done pastels mostly as portraits, but there's one oil pastel landscape I haven't scanned yet that came out impressionist by accident. I did it one afternoon while watching my grandkids, just had the Mi-Tientes pad out and fooled around with oil pastels while they played -- and totally by accident the sky started getting a textured character and the landscape started really working and having unity of strokes without a lot of detail. I stopped it before I wrecked it, because normally I'd have worked over every inch of it heavily, so it's in a loose sketchy style using the paper as much as the pastels.
I see what you mean about that in coming back after interruption. I have that problem with some interrupted pieces and not with others. Generally something finicky-detailed is easier to finish, especially if I did sketch thoroughly before setting it aside. But sometimes I do that and never go back over it with anything. If you're painting from life I can see it'd be even harder, because the light and the season passes, the branches move, things are not what they were when you go back to it.
I may try painting in that style eventually, but I'm mostly at home with it in pastels. I can't get fine resolution with pastels anyway so that constrains me to getting bold shapes and strong values and really paying attention to light. I guess if I did go in with colour shapers and sharpened the sticks and fussed at it a lot with tortillons I could get detail like a good charcoal piece, but I haven't bothered trying -- it's too much fun working fast with pastels.
Scary to try working that fast with oils and use them up that fast though! Heh, maybe this summer. Of course if I do paint impressionist style oils, then I have reason to use up my Winton oils well and start getting tubes of artist grade oils to compare... promised myself not to until I've used up the first set. They're nice big 37ml tubes too, so it will take a while.
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excellent the detail in this is amazing. ilike the way the bird is looknig over its shoulder. I specially like the beak for some reason.
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Thank you! I took as long on the beak as I did on the head and half the back, trying to get it absolutely perfect. It has some of the strongest value contrasts and also the subtlest shading in the whole piece, and it's the one part of this drawing I'm completely satisfied with.
I need to do more large birds sometime, this one was fun!
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yes you should and it shows in your work how much effort you put into it. looknig forward to more. haha still have to comment on most your new peices
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Oh Macaw got a lot of slow attention. I should do more slow detailed realistic pieces like that, especially of birds. Maybe birds in other colors...
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Wonderful details. I really adore how you paid so much attention to each feather. Wow, this looks so great. *applauds*
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Thank you! I was inspired by ~HOULY1970 , whose pencil drawings of eagles and hawks are that detailed feather by feather. They are glorious and realistic in the extreme, and eventually I will apply this to a hawk or eagle myself or some mythological bird in that raptor category. I found the Derwent Artist colored pencils with their clay-based core handle much more like a soft graphite pencil than like waxy Prismacolors. I love both effects, but I am more likely to do textured drawings with Derwents because of that.
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I love all of the details and the colors are beautiful!
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Lovely detail work with the greens Robert. I have to say those are some very impressive feathers.
k
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Thanks! The reference was so detailed that I could see every overlapping feather with its shading between that rusty color and the light green on the back, which wasn't as green as the head. It's a gorgeous photo from a wildlife calendar. The feathers in the photo reminded me of the backs of ~HOULY1970 's eagles and hawks, so I decided this was the time to try for exact rendering on feathers!
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I like it too.
Beautiful job on the head feathers.
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Thanks! The back feathers are brighter in person, a lot of highlights are exactly that shade of greenish-yellow that drops out in the scanner. I may try to do a photo of it when I get my camera set up, need to get the software downloaded and installed for that. Also finish the trade art since I feel a little bad about using the camera when she's had to wait that long for her art.
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Yeah, a camera shot will probably get all the colors.
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This summer I'm going to be yard saling a lot to find a tripod. It has to be stable, and I kept seeing them for years at yard sales when I didn't need it because I didn't have a camera. They cost a lot to get new, so wish me luck on finding one!
Part of my problem in art photography has just been holding the camera steady enough.
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Wah. The details are so perfect- the bird looks very floofy and pokable. I can tell that the original is more vivid, though.
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Yeah. I'm thinking once I get my digital camera installed properly (a project I've been putting off), I might try photographing it instead of just using the scan. The back is much more yellowgreen than the head, and some pieces my scanner's weird habit of dropping yellow-green and lemon yellow to white really make a difference.
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The only problem I have with digital camera is that it feels like it casts tones on the paper that I dislike... but sometimes it's good too.
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Some do this more than others. Good lighting can help a lot with it. I'm getting a Daylight table lamp in February, so on its gooseneck I can turn that to help illumine the art. I'm looking for a tripod so that I can eliminate my particular problem with it -- blurring. My new camera has much truer color than my old one too, I posted a few digital photos of art in 2004 but stopped when I got the scanner because I just wasn't getting clear focus or true color doing that by hand.
It's tricky and there are some technical things about aperture and stuff that I will need to test to get the knack of it, but I should be able to get rid of the gray cast of insufficient light if I put enough lights on the art. Or shoot art outdoors on sunny days, as one friend in the 80s did.
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Oh my what a lovely painting. Kudos to you for the wonderful detail work!
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