City Painting Packs it in

Finished!



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And finally on its way  --

With a bit more cardboard, plastic, bubble wrap and tape, of course .... it's huge.

Going all the way across the country -- UPS ground should get it there by early next week. 

Anybody else out there have an idea for a custom painting -- your favorite places, family names, or what-have you, email me for a quote!

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Birdland

Count on me to exhaust every possible "bird" pun over the next few weeks. 


Or months.


Because I've taken on a spectacular and challenging commission: to create a series of 15 oil paintings, each 24" x 36," and each depicting a bird native to Jamaica. 


I've never even drawn a bird before, let alone made a 2 foot by 3 foot painting of a bird. Or, um, 15 birds.


And my fresh, stretched canvases arrived this week -- 

so I must get started. Pronto.

I was given a list of 15 birds and began to search online for references.  


I have to confess, I'm no birder. That is either a gene that skipped my generation OR is one that is simply lying dormant until I reach a Certain Age, whereupon I will suddenly find all things ornithological completely captivating. And that has not happened yet.


But I digress.


So my bird reference search continued. I won't be painting a copy of someone's photograph but I needed to know what all of these birds look like -- their size, coloring, posture. I've downloaded dozens of images and printed out those that would be helpful to catch a pose, or color samples or even an environment in which to place each bird.


Infinite possibilities.

The must frustrating thing I've learned along the way, albeit not the most surprising, is that the name Jamaicans have given to a local bird is not necessarily the same name that the rest of the planet has adopted. 


Surprise, surprise.


But to be fair, the Jamaican nomenclature typically outshines all other options. To wit:


In Jamaica:  Cling Cling       Elsewhere: Greater Antillean Grackle


In Jamaica:  John Chewit      Elsewhere: Black-whiskered vireo  


The local flayvah has more flayvah.


And who knew that an Aunty Katy and a BananaQuit are one in the same? But of course!


So I decided to jump in with a familiar friend, the Parrot. Just about everybody calls a parrot a parrot.  I grabbed a pose from one photo and incorporated the thatchy-palm leaves from another to work up a sketch on paper. I drew a grid on my pad so I could scale my sketch up to the canvas.

Here's the light grid, in the same scale, drawn on the blank canvas:

This made it so much easier to re-draw my sketch on the canvas:

Now, the hard part -- painting these birdies. Time to crank up the music in the studio and get them flying...................

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City Painting - final stages

I'm pleased with how this painting is coming along -- and am nearly finished.

I was skeptical about the color-combination requested -- but using the Payne's Gray as the base, a nice cool, bluish gray, has resulted in a really lush, rich painting. 

It's funny, but sometimes I can't see the problem areas clearly until I take a wide photo. The camera does cause some distortion, since the painting is so large and I'm taking the photo at a short distance. Also, the uneven lighting casts some glare on the surface.


Even allowing for some slight curving distortion, in the photo, I can still see some areas that I want to even out a bit. The big "C" in Tacoma is a little lopsided, the baseline text of "WEST" in the upper right is uneven, and the surface of the letters in "Las Vegas" need some work.

But otherwise, almost done!




Do you have an idea for your own places/names painting? Put your order in  here,
or email me for more information.

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