I tried a different sort of background on this watercolor. All those dead mangroves and other trees made for a somewhat surreal background for these American Avocets and Black-necked Stilts.
I got a lot of photo reference for this painting on a family trip to Everglades National Park. We found these birds wading at Eco Pond near Flamingo.
When I was in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant for a course on the Ecology of the Everglades. Back then, Eco Pond was an impressively lush, green area, but it was full of invasive Brazilian Pepper. On our family visit years later, I was disappointed to find that it looked like a nuclear wasteland, full of dead mangroves and other plants.
I don’t know what happened. Maybe they tried to eradicate all of the invasives? Whatever the cause, it looked eerie and strange, with the potential to make for an interesting painting.
