Finishing up…

I started this Great Blue Heron painting a couple of months ago with intentions to finish it right away.  I had been looking at lots of paintings in the art nouveau style and was thinking about how to incorporate nature into the genre.  I did some preliminary sketches and started the pen work on the canvas.  And then life happened, as it often does.

So after weeks of being sick and then another week of being tired from being sick, I finally was feeling like tackling this painting again.  I had done the preliminary pen work for this painting and started to paint it and then decided I needed to go back and change some of the layout….so layers of gesso later I was able to work on it again.

The subtle colours in the neck of this bird are particularly challenging.  When you see this bird in the field, you don’t always notice all the different colours, but when you look really closely, it’s amazing what you will see.  It took a while, lots of layers of paint and glaze, but in the end, I’m quite pleased with the final product.