“This one’s for the birds.”
Today I’m sharing three iterations on a bird painting, where you can see me trying different things and learning more about different techniques to work with the medium, watercolor in this case.
Some artists get obsessed with a subject and just paint/draw it over and over and over again. I’m not like that—kind-of the opposite, actually. I love ideas but then once I’ve understood something or have given it expression once, I generally want to keep moving and exploring different territory.
That said, there is great value to trying the same thing over and over again. Not literally the same thing, though: each round should ideally give you more lessons learned that you can keep playing with and building or branching off of. By locking down one major parameter or set of parameters, you free yourself from having to spend time and energy problem solving around that/those parameters and can focus on other aspects of what you’re working on.
Edgar Degas was one such, very famous, obsessive artist. Here’s Degas:
“One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.”
However, I just flat out disagree with the second sentence of his quote. It’s just straight up wrong. There’s no “must” in “art”. It’s funny how there’s so many quotes throughout history of different artists saying that art must be this way or that way, or defining art to be this or that. And they all differ.
I love when art looks like somehow an accident resulted in this beautiful work.
And that interest of mine is actually why I set aside my inclination to keep doing different things1 to instead do some iterating on one subject. I’m going after approaches with water-based media that create images that look like paint splattered on the paper in the shape of X. Like a bird emerged from a splash of paint and a slash of the brush.
Alright, let’s check out the birds.
It seems like crows are a common subject of the kind of fluid water-splash aesthetic that I love. And in the same vein of me setting aside my impulse to keep doing different things, I also accepted that there’s nothing wrong with me wanting to paint awesome splattery crows, too.
Ok, Take 1 ended up looking kinda like a pigeon due to how I handled the value rendering, heh heh. But setting that aside, I got to see how some of the wet-in-wet painting played out and liked how the brushy-ness of the stroke came out in some places.
This gave me direction for how I wanted to approach Take 2. Let’s have a look:
Ooh, nice, this one came out tighter, with a better handling of how much detail to render for the look I’m after. I also got to observe how the paint handles working into different stages of wetness/dryness of the paper. But what if I want to render a little more and not just have mostly silhouettes? Also, let’s play with color.
With how Take 2 turned out, I’m ready to move to proper watercolor paper on Take 3 to see how it behaves.
Very cool! This one kept growing on me. A lot of different kinds of cool brushwork results. Love the vibrance. I also moved away from “crow”, specifically, with this one, which is why the second sentence of this post says “bird painting”, even though the first two were crows.
There will be more bird (and other) painting iterating.
Like how there’s so many different visual approaches in my recently filled up sketchbook.