Speaking of Art Blog

Finch Feathers, pastel, 10x8"

This is my latest pastel painting, of a male House Finch that was perched on the metal handle of one of our bird feeders on our deck this winter.  I love finches.  They are small and cute and smart and fairly trusting of humans.  This one glanced at me over its shoulder as I stood only a few feet away inside our house by a window.  I was able to get some great pics of all its beautifully detailed feathers.  The white snow on the ground and deck provided some dramatic light reflecting upward onto the bird’s underside.

When I started choosing my colors for the bird’s head and upper back, I was having a hard time deciding what to use because I was seeing a combination of several colors – red, various shades of warm brown, red-orange, off-white, and even some golden tones.  My goodness.  I consulted Randy, my bird watching guru husband, about the colors he has noticed in a male House Finch’s head and upper back.  He told me the same thing, that there are lots of colors and it all depends on the strength and angle of the light.

I pondered what to do and finally started to experiment using lots of different pastel pencil colors.  I first tried red, red-orange, and brown, but it just wasn’t glowing enough.  So I threw in some gold color, but it still wasn’t giving me the effect I needed.  Finally on the urging of Randy, I tried adding violet, pure bright violet, and that did the trick.  And that’s when it dawned on me, that if my husband can’t even verbalize what color he sees in a bird’s feathers, then I need to use more than just a couple of colors.  I need to use a LOT of colors, all the ones I’m kinda sorta seeing in there.

Human skin has tons of colors in its pigment, so why wouldn’t a bird have lots of colors in their feathers even if the overall color reads as one shade?  But here’s the key to putting down all those colors when creating feathers – I do not blend them. I layer the colors next to each other in a pointillistic manner and then leave them alone.  Blending smears the colors together and creates mud, literally.  And what color is mud?  Well, sort of a brownish grayish nothing color.  It is certainly not vivid.  That is not what I was after.  I wanted a vibrantly colored mottled effect.  So I set strokes of all the colors I could see next to and on top of each other, but they remained untouched by my fingers.  No blending allowed.  But I also had to remember not to create a rainbow.  Too many colors and that’s what happens.

Stepping back, does it look like the bird’s head is one color?  Yes, in a mottled sort of way.  And on closer observation I was delighted to see all kinds of striking color marks that are analogous to each other on the color wheel: violet, red-violet, red, red-orange, orange, and a little bit of golden yellow-orange.  Additionally, some warm red-browns and off-white strokes helped to create dull vs vibrant contrast.

The moral of this story?  When in doubt, throw on the color, every color you see.  With those indefinable yet vibrant colored feathers, try more colors, not less, but stick with a limited analogous color palette (colors next to each other on the color wheel).  My goal was to make that finch’s head and upper back feathers glow with a red-orange vibe.  Mission accomplished. And the finch even flashed its darling nod of approval at me over its shoulder.  So sweet.