Female/Immature Common Redpoll Painting (10×7-inch Watercolor and Time Lapse Video)

It’s been over a month since I posted. I’ve been insanely busy with medical illustration and animation work, which is good, since my freelance work tends to be “Feast or Famine.” Plus, it was peak season for mountain biking. This blog is the first thing to suffer during a big time crunch. I’d rather post less and use the time to get in some painting. This particular painting was fairly speedy.

I often find myself painting off-season: winter scenes in summer and summer scenes in winter. I think you can be more positive about the opposite end of the calendar at times, so a redpoll seemed like the way to go.

I first saw Common Redpolls on a frozen, windy Christmas morning. Now that was an unexpected gift! Since then I’ve had the pleasure of seeing them many times, but there is still always a great thrill when they pop in for a visit. They have been occasional winter visitors at out thistle feeders.

I had crisp photos of this immature female, but they had a drab, gray background. The one I chose had a clear image but lacked any wintery magic, looking a bit oppressive instead. I wanted to play with a more colorful, snowy background to make it different from—and more inviting than—the photos I got from the kitchen window.

Typically I paint transparent watercolors. That means that any white on the page is the white of the paper. This adds a level of difficulty to the painting when you have to paint around tiny details like the highlights of eyes to retain the white. With snowy scenes there is really no good way around it. You have to go with opaque whites.

Using opaque watercolors (gouache) for snow requires taking a perfectly good, almost completely finished background and spattering white paint on it, which can go disastrously wrong. That adds to my general reluctance to do snowy scenes. Once I had everything else wrapped up on this painting, I put it away for the night to decide if I really, really, REALLY wanted to have snow on the background. In the morning I realized that my main reason for omitting the snow wasn’t that the painting would no longer be 100% transparent watercolor or that the snow would be frivolous. It was that I was afraid of screwing it up while putting in the snow. Well, who wants to be called a coward?! So I “damned the torpedoes” and set about spattering white paint onto a perfectly good painting. In the end I was glad that I did. I think it added a level of depth, interest and atmosphere. I’ve included a copy of the “No Snow” version as well. What do you think?