Alison C. Board | Brusho Bites: Goldfinch Tutorial | SAA Archives

Hi, my name is Ali. This painting I'm going to be sharing a portrait of this goldfinch. Now for me they herald the beginning of spring. I start to see them in bigger numbers and they start to peck away at all the lovely seed heads in the hedgerows. I start to notice them on my dog walks a little bit more. I've drawn my picture out ready onto my watercolour paper using the trace down method and the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to get colour on everything in a combination of watercolours and brusho. So let's get started. For the background I'm going to be using a large brush and a combination of sap green watercolour and a little bit of translucent grey. I'm going to have a kitchen roll rolled up ready so that I can take care of the edges but one of the first things I'm going to do is that I'm going to use my spray bottle just to lay down a bit of water in the background so that it's got somewhere to escape into. So spraying that down, I'm not worried about it touching the bird, because the colours that I'm going to use are going to be relatively pale. So there's my puddle of sap green and I'm not really going to wash my brush out that much. I'm going to go straight into the translucent grey and there on my palette you can start to see that one flows into the other so I'll get combinations of the two as well. Washing out my brush, picking up just the pure sap green and looking to add the sap green where the bird is dark. So it can run off into those wet areas that I created with my spray bottle but I can also move it with a little bit of water if I want to. Now this is just the background and it's very tempting when you start painting backgrounds to start to get all worried about where they are and what they're doing and all the rest of it but this is literally just a backdrop for our bird, nothing more. Adding some water, using my kitchen roll to take care of those edges, making it nice and soft. Picking up some more colour, working my way around the bird so I'm painting negatively, using more water to blend that out. Now down here on the chest of my bench I want to add a little more dark and that's simply because this area of the bird is going to rely on the white of the paper and therefore if I want the white to stand out I need to put a dark against it. So let's get that colour coming out into the background and using our kitchen roll to take care of those edges. I'm painting quite quickly then I don't have to worry about poking it around too much and I can get on to the good bit which is painting the bird. A few things to remember, when you've got your colour on your palette look for where there are any gaps, so there's a gap in between the bird's legs down here. I can use the very fine point of this number 10 brush to be able to do that and obviously I need to take care of the colour that's underneath the branch as well. If you forget them it's quite difficult to then try and mix up exactly the same colours all over again to address them so try to do it all in one go and then you don't have to worry about it. Let's pull that colour down the page a little, making sure that I've got a little bit of it underneath the tail, everything else will take care of itself. So there's my background in nice and simple. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to put some colour onto the bird just to block everything in then when that's dry I can work back into that and really pull out the features that I want. So let's make up our colour ready. I've got some dark brown brusho here which I'm going to tap out onto my palette. Let's pop that to one side and I've got some brilliant red. Now as you can see, I'm sure you've already guessed, the brilliant red is going to take care of some of the features of the bird and the dark brown I'm going to make up very pale. One of the first things I need to do is I'm going to add some wax resist. Now this is what I would call a soft resist so it doesn't come off and what I'm looking to do is to pop it down in the areas which I know I want to save the white of my paper. So first of all I'm going to pop some over the back of his head and underneath. You can experiment with how hard you need to press to get it to repel the colour. Let's put that in under there. I could actually afford to put a little bit down his beak too. Let's look at the back of him and pop some in there. It can be a little bit tricky to see where you've put it but that's half the fun I think, the experimenting. And pop some on his chest and then a little bit of it down his back towards his tail area too. That should push the colour away when I put some washes down. Let's think about the colours that we're going to mix up ready. So I've already got my translucent grey here but I'm going to pull my translucent grey on the other side of where I've squeezed it out so that I know that that hasn't got any of the green in it. I'm going to also add some water by pulling some of that dark brown out. Now I need that colour to be really quite pale so I can afford to add lots of water in there. And then I only need a tiny touch of red and this Brusho Red is really really strong so you won't need very much of it and sometimes it can benefit by picking up a little bit of the brown powder and adding that in which just dulls the colour ever so slightly. Last but not least I've got the Quinacridone Gold which is going to give that amazing flash of yellow and gives the bird its name down the back. So all my colours are ready to go. Let's keep with the size 10 brush but we might also have a number 8 brush just to hand as well if I need to get into any of the corners. So the first thing I'm going to do is pick up that dark brown Brusho I'm going to start to look at where I've got those lovely markings so can you see straight away the wax is repelling that colour and giving me a lovely soft edge to it. So I can pop it in there and bring that colour down using my kitchen roll just to take off the moisture. Oh I've missed a bit, needs a bit this side as well. Popping that in, up and around, there we go. Let's switch to the slightly smaller brush and the Translucent Grey. Now I'm going to try to be quite brave with this colour let's test it on my kitchen roll first. That needs to go in at the back of my bird's head and I can use the point of my lovely fine brush in order to get that colour looking like it's feather rather than a block. There are other things that we're going to do to it later on in this demonstration but let's start as we mean to go on and also that colour needs to be in and around the eye. So we're putting some in among the beak and around the back and he's really starting to come to life now and take shape. We need a flash of that Translucent Grey down the back so let's pop that in there, that's his wing which is just tucked away and as you can see the black is running into the brown but that's fine don't worry. Get that in, make that come off into a point that's better and then we still need some of it, oh my green is leaching into it that's okay I'll avoid it. Paint that in and paint the tail in too, only touches of colour. One of the things that you can do with bird portraits if you make sure that the beak and the eye are correct then that tends to describe the species anyway and because we have a finch here they've got those really quite pronounced beaks. Let's put a little bit of the grey in for shadow under here and we will very quickly put in the yellow flash down the back which I'm very excited to put in because I just love this colour. Put that yellow in there and we're going to swap back to the big brush and use some of the brown to put some colour on the branch. I'm not really going to pay too much attention to the branch or the feet simply because I am more interested in the eye and the flashes of colour on this bird. Let's take some of those out that's better and of course I've been saving the best till last that amazing red mixed in with a little bit of brown. Try not to put my hand in the branch and get that colour in because that's the thing, that and the yellow is the thing that's going to say what species this bird is. It goes underneath there, take some water and we'll just lighten that a little bit and we can pull that colour out and round. Lots of areas of this can be neatened up with some of the techniques I'm going to show you when it's all dry but we need to start somewhere. So let's get the red in, starting to look good now. I'm not going to worry about his eye too much because I know I've got a tool that will do a better job of that in a minute and although those colours seem very soft and very gentle at the moment they are where I need them to be. Let's get his feet in and then we can let him dry. So I'm going to use my brush, a bit like a drawing tool really now to get the essence of those feet in, to get legs in. Let's just hide the end of those. So this is like the preliminary version of things really, getting the colour in, making sure we know where it all needs to be and then we can do lots of tweaking later. Other leg, needs a bit of a shadow in up there. Let's make it brown. Okay, so he's a little bit dull at the moment but I'm going to bring him out but I do need to let him dry before I can continue. My painting is completely dry now which means I can work back into it with lots of different materials in order to bring this portrait to life. Everything's got colour on it but it lacks detail. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to work back into it with a waterproof sketching pen. Now the argument is always, well why don't you put the pen down first but one of the reasons I don't like doing it in that order is because if I put pen down I then start to fill in those shapes with colour and actually with a bird which is fluffy you want the personality of it to come out so I'm looking to see where my watercolour or my brusho has dried and then I can work back in with the pen. But of course one of the first things I do need to get in is I do need to get this beady eye in. So I'm starting by a little bit of outlining and I'm going to do some shading with the pen too. I'm going to work my way around the highlight in the eye but it's not the end of the world if you forget and you fill it in because you can always go back in with some paint or some of the other materials that I'm going to show you later. I'm going to do an outline around the eye because there's a double rim I can see on the photograph and some of these areas which need a bit of defining between the red and the black I can now start to work on. I can already see that that black isn't quite black enough but that's okay I've got other things I can do to it. I don't really want to outline the red simply because I haven't got a red pen in my hand but what I can do is use the black pen against the black and you can see straight away that those darks aren't nearly dark enough but that's okay that's what we're here to do we're here to edit it. A few little marks over the back of him and now I can use the pen to really go over that wing detail to bring that out and hopefully you can start to see how the addition of these pen marks is bringing it all together and just making sense of some of the marks that I've made. Popping pen in on his legs let's make that leg disappear and we'll just do a few marks down for the feet. Like I said I'm not that interested in his feet I'm more interested in this area but we need to give him something to stand on. Let's get around those there and let's make sure that we don't neglect his tail which can go in there. I'm not going to outline the branch because then he is proud of the branch and he's sitting on it. Popping that to one side I'm going to switch now to pastel pencils. So these are chalk pastels these are very blendable very soft but in pencil format which means you can be a lot more accurate with them and I've got three colours here I've got chocolate, I've got carbon black and I've got titanium white. I'm sure you can tell why I've chosen those colours. Let's start with the carbon black. I've sharpened them to a really fine point and I can start to work back in. Why use pastel? Why not just go in back in with the brush show or the watercolour? Well I love to use pastel in my animal portraits because I think it's the thing that says fluff or feather and I can use my finger start to blend them together a little bit as well and then I can get lovely grades of colour. Go back in with the white. This is actually going over the top of the wax resist stick and it will work it will go over the top. Let's get that a little bit whiter. Get that in and I can start to get his beak bill really whiter too. So give it a quick blow. Not a good idea of somebody standing opposite you and let's get some of those marks in and I'm going to instead of using it in pencil format now I'm going to put my hand over the top of it and start to use it on its side so that I can tackle some broader areas. Using that in on there. Use my finger to blend those together a bit more too and just like some of the previous projects that I've worked on I can start to see where my watercolour is lacking in depth now but that's why you need to build up a painting all together rather than just section by section. You can see quite clearly that the red needs to be redder that the black needs to be blacker and it's all of these products that have helped me come to those decisions. So let's use my finger in use a little bit more of it in there so that's whiter. You don't have to worry about any water touching the pastel you don't have to keep it away from the pastel sometimes you can experiment with using water to move pastel around which you can get some very interesting effects with. Little bit more of it in for me and then I'm going to switch back to my watercolour straight away. I haven't finished with those yet, I do still need them. I'm going to switch back to a slightly smaller brush, a size 6 brush and back into some of the colours that I was using earlier. Let's wet that brush up and let's get in with the translucent grey. Now making up a nice rich version of the colour making sure I've got my kitchen roll to hand and I'm going to work back into this dark area. It's not quite the right shape at the moment so let's work on that first and this is one of the great bits about working on pictures like this you can now start to really pull it together and really tweak it. Getting the colour in around the eye to deepen that. That's better, that looks more lifelike and I can now start to get the black in around and over the top painting around that area that I left before however if it's not in the right place that's not a problem. I can wait until it's dry and I can go back in with my white pastel and I can alter it that way. Now he's starting to really come to life. Let's give his beak a little bit of a very pale pinky grey shadow so I've got a little bit of watercolour, a tiny bit of brusho and even though it's over the top of the pastel hopefully you can see that it's just giving it enough colour to stop it looking quite so stark. That's good in there and I do need to make that red of him more red so let's get the neat brusho, no mixing the brown in with it this time and popping that colour in. That's better, now his face is starting to come together. Now at the moment he is looking a little bit stuffed and that does sometimes happen with animal and bird portraits that they need a little bit of life to them and there's lots of ways that you can address that. You can work very closely with adding more feather or fluff. I like to give mine a little bit more movement so one of the things I'm going to do is I'm going to give him a little bit of speckling and I'm going to use little bits of kitchen roll around him just so that it doesn't go in the background so let's pop a little bit in there and a bit in there yes I will put another bit in there as well and I'm going to go back to my brusho, back to the brown but making up a pale version of it and then with my brush just going to very lightly speckle some colour over the top of him and use a spray bottle to make those marks a little fainter there we go so it's the tiniest of touches but sometimes it's just enough move that with my brush as well to bring him to life if you make your brush marks too careful you can end up over painting him so let's put a shadow in on this side and now I'm just tweaking him so that I start to bring him to life that shadow on his wing needs to be darker as well let's pop that in that's better that's much better and the depth of colour down in there and actually what I'm going to do down there is I'm going to allow that colour just to bleed out a little let's feather that up into the other areas so all of those materials are all starting to work together now and that's what you want them to do you want them to do all the hard work, not you two more things I think I've got to do one is to increase the depth of colour on his tail just in there blending that in that's better looks more like part of him now and the other thing that I need to do is to go back in with the white and if that's dry which I think it is yes it is marvellous I can just add a slight highlight or I can do the very useful trick one last thing if you want a white area to look whiter or brighter then what you actually need to do is to make the thing next to it darker so I'm going to take some of the sap green and the translucent grey that I used right at the top of the painting pop a little bit of water around in the area that I want it to dissolve into and then pop a nice dark in and around and can you see straight away his beak starts to become more prominent and then I'm doing less to him and more to the background and there we go he's in a nice quick way of getting a little character that I find in my garden all the time down onto paper with a lovely mixture of materials