airborne lunch attack: 2.2

i don't have time to write much about technique and steps right now but i will come back and go over them shortly. in the mean time i thought that i would post just the photo of the painting at the time that i stopped painting today. so far this has been great fun and i hope you have enjoyed watching along as much as i have enjoyed painting it.

much later than expected: the first thing that i painted today was the pigeon. the light gray was made using cerulean blue, carmine and yellow ochre; the darker gray a combination of ultramarine blue and burst sienna. using a #8 round brush i started at the end of the near wing and painted the individual feathers which are quite distinct on the reference photo. as i moved back from the tips toward the body there was a natural lightening of the value as i ran out of paint. near the end i washed the brush and drew the remaining pigment out with clear water giving a nice feathering (no pun intended) of the stroke. this same notion was reduplicated on the nearer patch of feathers closer to the shoulder of the bird leaving a white patch over the near shoulder. same deal with the tail. the body was pretty simply painted with the light gray mixture and some of the darker paint was applied to the inferior part of the beak leaving a light highlight on the top. i couldn't come up with any better way to depict the moving wing so i just left it a blur with lost edges everywhere except at the point nearest the body. i thought that i needed some more of the yellow coloring in the painting so that the hat wouldn't seem so lonely so i put some of the yellow ochre on the park bench at the far right just to see if i thought that would work. i think that it will. additionally i wasn't wild about the entirely bare area under the bench so i drew in the rather complicated leg structure. now i just have to decide how to paint this so that it isn't "too much." i believe that is all for this section so on to the next stage and post.