What is cuter than a Chickadee? Chickadees are incredibly common, and I’ve sketched them dozens of times, but I’ve only painted them once. Their high-contrast coloration makes them a little trickier for watercolor. For the same reason it’s hard to get a good exposure of them when photographing, scanning or printing. They are super high-contrast birds with rich blacks right next to delicate whites. In watercolor having black and white next to each other is tricky because the darker colors can lift and run into your light areas, and you can end up with a muddy mess. To keep colors crisp you are forced to paint your lights first and bring in the darks later, which makes balancing colors harder. The reason photos, prints and scans also have problems with those high-contrast areas is that you tend to expose for either lights or darks, and having to compromise results in one or both suffering in the end.
I had great photo references from a snowy day at our bird feeders. It was a lot of fun rendering the snow. One always thinks of snow as being white, but I’ve always been amazed at how many tones it can take on in different lighting conditions. I feel bad for people who have never REALLY experienced snow. On a sunny day with fresh snow, you can be treated to diamond-like refractions of sparkling snow with every color of the rainbow in tiny, intense sparks of pure color. In the evening the same snow might appear cobalt blue from the window, and at sunrise it might be pink, orange or yellow with purple-blue shadows. In this painting I had fun playing with the effect that snow has as it gets deeper and more tunnel-like, taking on a blue tint.
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