Goose & the Gander

Posted on by

I’ve been having a great time learning the art of watercolour painting. Here a little peak into the process for one of my recent pieces.

I knew before starting tonight, that whatever I was going to paint would end up in this frame with olive/tan mat. I then made sure that I chose a large enough piece of cold press 140lb paper.
It is a Thrift Shop picture frame with mat for ONLY $2 !
THIS IS NOT MY IMAGE, it is a free reference photo. I chose it because I was inspired by the soft feathers. There is so much white detail, the challenge will be to LEAVE white lines to define the feathers.
I roughly traced the geese outline through computer screen (turn lights off around you for best results)
I decided to do the pond water first, without using masking fluid to preserve white on the geese.
The pond water colours messed up, so I just splattered more clean water on it to make more ugly puddles . My motto was “go with the flow” literally. It was very hard to do the water between the necks (note to self* use masking fluid to preserve white next time)
I love the soft feather colour, I mixed and mixed until I created the one I wanted then diluted with a lot of water. It’s yellow umber, violet, panes grey and maybe something else. It dried beautifully in my opinion 🙂
The shadows on the black necks were created by using a dry brush to lift off some wet black paint.
I am very happy with the result in this mat and frame. I’ll work on the water next time.
It’s now a partner for this wonderful Canada Goose painting (called “Partners”) done in the 80’s by my step-father, Marvin Poole. His pond water is beautiful and I aspire to create that in my future paintings.