Gannet 4
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Decided to break the picture down into another step rather than going straight in with the cliffs. Therefore I first painted the bird in flight. This was simplicity itself. Only the tips of the wings, the side and the head and two of them required virtually np painting at all. The wing tips were a mix of Ultramarine Blue and Burnt Sienna which makes my favourite black and in this instance it erred on the grey sky to help with the illusion of distance. Here I just blocked the wings in before a tiny blob of yellow was added for the head and a mix of Ultramarine Blue and White gave me a shadow colour along the base and around the lower wing to give it a bit of form but other than that absolutely no detail owing to the distance. Then I turned my attention to the cliffs. Initially I was going to simply paint the birds themselves on bare rock but another painting I saw showed them appearing to sit on a rather untidy and messy nest of seaweed and whilst I initially had no idea how to recreate this I decided to set myself a challenge and give it a go. In fact all I did was mix up in turn a variety of greens and paint them in straggly lines one over the other, then I darkened them with some Ultramarine Blue and letting it dry. I then gave it a glaze of Burnt Sienna and again allowed it to dry. This still appeared to bright but I noticed the wet in wet application had produced a lot of random shapes I therefore used a lining pen to trace over these which seemed to give a nice random effect of seaweed but having over done it slightly I added white highlights where I felt necessary before applying a yellow glaze ove the whole 'nest'. I wasn't happy with the seaweed where I'd painted it between the birds tails feeling that was too high so simply painted it out with some white. Let it all dry and hey presto a reasonable depiction of seaweed. I will confess at this stage my to paint overtook my desire for accuracy so I may be totally wrong here depicting the birds sitting high up
More by Angus Ballantine
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