To be honest, I never really liked painting natural things with acrylic. I've tended to paint mandalas and other abstract paintings this way.
Yesterday I finally got myself to take on this new challenge. I have a few half-finished paintings with various abstract backgrounds set aside to continue. One of them started out as an acrylic pouring, but I messed up and scraped a grid with my fingers into the still-liquid paint. I thought of pouring, by the way, as paint scraping, or recycling leftover paint, and it made a huge mess, and I ended up covered from head to toe in paint.
Well, this is how it looked originally, I painted turquoise and dark blue stripes on it afterwards to frame it.
What should I paint on it? One of my favourite birds!
But if I paint directly on the canvas, I have to apply a lot of layers, and even then, I'm not sure you can't see the texture of the underpainting. But I had an idea: I'll draw the bird on a piece of canvas, then cut it out with scissors and glue it onto the base!
I also darkened the background and added vertical stripes.
I placed the cut-out bird on it. The branch the bird is sitting on is a bit short, but never mind!
I didn't take any photos of what happened next, because I was so immersed in the painting. Basically, I primed its body with light purple-brownish colors, the wings with ultramarine blue and the beak with light bluish grey.
The yellow spots on the tree branch represent lichen.
I had some work to do on the background, because I felt the bird didn't stand out enough, so I darkened it in several places.
The outlines are very delicately contoured.
Details:
I've also thought about using several layers of fabric or clay next time, to bring out the theme more.
See my recent painting of hawfinch, it is a watercolor: https://peakd.com/hive-156509/@fairyberry/my-watercolor-hungry-hawfinch
