2/5/2024 0 Comments Gang gang cockatoo locationLucky Canberra has them as visitors much more frequently. It is a welcome visitor to our reserves and forests in Victoria in winter. The gang-gang cockatoo is a beautiful bird, sadly endangered, especially after the bushfires of 2020 and the clearing of forests. I chose to call that one "The Listener" because the male was clearly not getting a word into that conversation! For this one, I went with the straight "Mr and Mrs Gang-Gang" title to emphasise their status as a couple, doing all the things that couples usually do, including discussing the kids. For example, I recently did a watercolour of a male and female Victoria's rifle birds. When an artwork is finished, I think about naming the piece, and I usually try and choose a title that adds to the story. Sometimes I work away at the painting always looking at the reference photo to try to get the placement of feathers from the lines in the right place but until I finish an area of work I don’t really know how it’s going to turn out, and that’s part of the adventure in doing art! I’ll test techniques on a scrap good quality paper to see how that will work before I do it on the artwork itself. Some of that time has been just looking at pictures, drawing the composition, revising the composition until it is right, and mixing colours and doing test swatches. In this case I’ve been working on the project for three weeks roughly 2 to 4 hours most days.So this one took somewhere between 45 and 50 hours. I'm often asked how long it takes me to do an art work, and occasionally I’ve tallied up the hours. I preserved the edges and used a slightly different red than the male before doing the final texture into each feather. Hers are entirely made up of fine stripes. I used a similar colour and technique on the female, but to make her appear to be slightly behind the male I gave her slightly different coloured feathers. I then went back in with a pale yellow to the feathers that had the yellow edges and then with the Silver 20/0 brush I “drew” in individual lines to get the detail. On the photo the feathers have white or yellow edges on the male and reddish edges on the female. Using light to medium colour, I painted each feather, trying to imitate the shapes in the reference photo, leaving the edges white. Next I used a grey blue mix for the male's feathers (using brushes Neef Taklon 000 and 10/0). I added a little bit of grey and left some blank areas to imitate the feathers on the bird. I used a Silver ultra mini 20/0 brush to get the fine lines, and I used a mixture of red, yellows, oranges and white to get the texture of the feathers. Next I worked on the male's decorative head feathers: again, if these didn’t work, the whole picture wasn’t going to work. Both birds' beaks are fairly grubby, so I mixed some pinkish colours and some grey colours to mimic the colours in the photo and left parts of the beaks white to make them stand against the backdrop of the feathers. The female seems to have damage to her beak and some regrowth. The gang-gangs' beaks are so expressive! The male’s beak doesn’t close quite properly: the bottom beak closes to the right of his top beak giving him a lopsided grin. I did the beaks next because again I felt if the beaks weren’t right, the birds wouldn’t be right. I used some masking fluid to preserve the highlights and parts of the skin around the eyes, and I made a mix using some of the red used for the males face along with a blue grey mix that I used for the both birds feathers. Most wildlife artists would tell you do the eyes first, because if the eyes aren’t right, the picture won’t be right. In painting the birds, I started with the eyes. Beverley's reference photo had the female facing to the left so I flipped the image so the male and the female are facing more or less the same way having this conversation. For example, they could be like a couple discussing how to stop the kids spending too much time on the screen. I studied all the photos for a number of days - even months - before I decided on the composition of this artwork.Īs artists, we're encouraged to try and have three objects in a piece of art rather than two, but in this case, I wanted a pair of the birds looking as if they are having a private conversation. Luckily, there were adult males - as well as females balancing on branches near the fountain, and diving in to have a drink. There were several juveniles, the males with less vivid, red heads and more patchy colour. From this trip, the gang-gangs taken at the water fountain at the caravan park really fit the bill. Once we return, Beverley's photos get processed and edited, and so on, and then I sift through them, seeing what's going to work for me.
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