Surviving Winter

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Photo from Our Window

We really enjoy painting outdoors during the winter, even though we don’t necessarily like the cold! Dressing properly helps make the exercise tolerable. The light in winter is worth it and when it snows, the bare, snow-covered landscape provides lots of picture-making opportunities. Lately, though, the country has been in a deep freeze—way too cold to paint for us, even though the light has been wonderful. So, stuck indoors, we turn to whatever is going on outside our big windows for subject matter.

Fortunately, we live in a forest, so the wildlife is abundant and active, especially the poor birds who contend with wind and extreme cold. To help with that, we have several seed and suet feeders out, and this helps keep our populations healthy through the winter. As important as food, though, is an unfrozen water source. We put a heated dog water bowl on top of a snow-filled birdbath about 5 feet from our windows downstairs and the birds flock to it throughout the day. This year, we were thrilled to see that the bluebirds were back and using that water. We tried to draw them as they came and went, but they move away too quickly to get any poses done. In this event, it is useful to use a camera to take rapid fire photos which can be edited later. I chose one to make a watercolor study, thinking I might create a larger, 20 x 30 inch version if it worked well. This is a great way to keep working from Nature even in the toughest weather.

This series of progressive images was grabbed off of a video I made while I painted the study. It gives an idea of how I went about painting it. When I get that edited we will post it for you to enjoy.

Drawing is so important to start with, and I needed to understand the bluebirds individual anatomy before I began painting. I’m using 300 lb. Arches rough.

I like to work wet-into-wet whenever I can, so I just started in with some burnt Sienna, burnt umber, cobalt blue and horizon blue mixes, pushing the chroma up beyond what was in my reference.

Working light to dark, I painted each bird in succession and added the bowl to help fix them to a ground plane.

One of my goals was to show the variety of expressions and poses these little birds exhibit around the water hole. They are generally very sociable, (they nest together in a tree hole in winter), and don’t seem to attack other birds who come to drink.