Painting of Green Heron in breeding plumage using pastels

The rain and cold has kept me indoors lately and what better time than to finish the bird painting I had started a few weeks ago. With only just the branch left to do, I locked myself in the studio, put on some music (great motivator!) and grabbed my pastels. I may touch up the branch some more before framing the artwork but this little guy is pretty much "hot off the easel"...

Title: "Enchanted Moment"
Green Heron
Medium: Pastel on archival paper
Size: 13.5"x10"

To see more avian artwork, visit my website at http://www.colettetheriault.com/descriptions/paint1description/green_heron_painting.php

New wildlife bird painting on the easel

As an artist, it might surprise some that spending a lot of time on my computer is essential when preparing for my next composition. Before I can actually sit down and paint, I sort through the thousands of digital photographs I have taken and then sometimes need to combine and manipulate the images using Photoshop until a suitable pose is reached.  I also spend a lot of time out in the field, researching, collecting and taking photographs of whatever plant, animal or scene that might inspire a future painting.

The following work in progress features a green heron in breeding plumage. The reference photographs were taken while camping in St Augustine , FL. I would wake up early each morning before the majority of humans were out and about and when the creatures were still active, and left with 2 cameras in hand... I can spend hours in the field observing and photographing my subjects so loosing track of time is a common occurrence. The adult heron in the painting was watching over her brood which had fledged the nest and were perched hiding amongst the mangroves.

A bit of background...

Backgrounds are usually not my strong point so I probably should have started it first in this case. I just couldn't help but begin with the strange looking bird!

 The plan is to methodically work my way downwards at this point but I may begin to randomly paint the water when I begin to loose my concentration! We'll see what happens...

Duck Painting Progress

I made some good progress today and happy how the pastel is working for me on this piece. I'm using a combination of Rembrant's round sticks and Pitt's FaberCastel pastel pencils for the finer details.

On a roll...another bird on the easel

This is the first scan of the work in progress of a duck painting. I'm using pastels on archival suede board. The soft suede support works differently than the sandpaper with much less blending on the suede.

Painting of swan family-pastels

There birds were swimming past me under the cover of some trees and as a result, the light spots on the last few swans and on the ground are due to the sunlight penetrating the canopy.
This is taking a long time to work the details of the ripples but relatively much shorter when compared to the other mediums I work with (colored pencil, graphite and watercolor).