Hello Bird!

Continuing onto the next unit of Juliette Crane’s Whimsical Animals classes. Today’s unit is An Animal with Closed Eyes + Adding Painted Pages, and once again, we draw an owl! Although I’m not much of an owl person, I thought it’s good practice to learn how to paint birds. We live in a pretty remote farming village in the Netherlands but rather than in the middle of the vast flat fields, our house is situated along a small stream surrounded by tall trees on the other side. This attracts a wide species of rare birds, more than ten kinds in fact come flying around within minutes, according to my bird-specialist partner. And every time a bird comes flying across, I start greeting them, “Hello Bird!” My partner finds it adorable. So of course this is a great time to add birds in my list of “learn to draw”!

Adding Painted Pages

In this class, Juliette demonstrates another idea: integrating another painted page as a collage in your artwork! Painted page refers to any kind of doodling or random bits and bobs you paint on a separate piece of paper which you can later tear or cut up and recreate. In my case, my “painted page” is a sheet I typically use as a paint palette on which I blot, test or mix colors. It is not my first time I have made artwork from them, as I frequently paint over them and recreate. On this occasion, though, we tear them up and glue them onto another sheet. Here is mine on a small 20cm x 20cm canvas. How colorful is that!

My Animal with Closed Eyes

Juliette further advises us that if one has trouble painting eyes, making them closed is a good option. In fact, closed eyes do add some calm and peace to the painting. A sense of serenity. I cannot agree more! And for this painting, we add layer after layer of acrylic paint and water-soluble pastels but still allow some of the areas from the “painted page” to show through. Another sound advice Juliette gives is to firstly outline your animal with aquarelle pencil as it’s easily erasable (wipe off with wet tissue and start again) then go over it with marks-all pencil or black marker. In the end, I took the liberty of embellishing my piece with some glittery textures.

Mediums Used

Spreading water-soluble oil pastel colors with white acrylic paint worked really well. What a brilliant idea, and why didn’t I think of that before! Here I went for pastels by Art Philosophy, whilst the paint by Golden fluid acrylic. Teal and Green Gold make an amazing combination for the background as well, And we love those neon colors by ARA! They’re great as subtle accents. For glitter, I went for Stickles by Rangers, jar of white Cosmic Shimmer, Art by Marlene in Fold and Turner’s Acrylic Gouache in Lame Clear Opal.

This unit was described as creating a “13-minute” painting”, but it took me a good few hours to complete! Nevertheless I enjoyed the challenge and had so much fun which is more important than how long you spend on it. The point of creating is also to relax and unwind! Whilst I do definitely need more practice painting birds, my partner was well impressed with this piece, especially as he told me it’s his favorite of all my artwork and that we definitely need to hang it somewhere. That really means so much to me… and more the reason to be cheerfully cry “Hello Bird!” more often!

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