The parakeets find the perfect camouflage among the colorful tropical foliage. Don’t they look happy?
Appropriately, this journal spread was a joy to create—at least once I got started. I was approaching an unknown journey and had my hesitations. But starting is always the hardest part for me. How about you?
So, this is the finished piece, but let me show you how I began:
I loosely sketched the parakeets, but that was the end of the planning and/or pencil work.
The first leaves were the ones on the vertical branch on the right. I just put color after color in those leaves, mostly not cleaning the brush between them and also not minding that my paint puddles were getting very messy. As it turns out, that gave a much richer range of color.
From there, I worked on the parakeets. I was establishing their color palettes and getting a bit of detail in. But I think the most important part was painting the eyes. From that moment on, they were watching me, and I knew I’d better do a good job!
Next were the other leaves. First I painted the little clover leaf looking things, then the shapes of the big leaves at the bottom. By the time I’d put detail in two of those leaves, it was enough for one day!
I wish I hadn’t added those little leaves and branches though. They made it challenging to work more on the parakeet bodies.
Time for day two:
On day two I mostly continued with what I already had: more detail on the birds and the large leaves. But I also added the branch the birds are sitting on as well as the feet of the two left birds.
The branch was intended to serve two purposes. First, the birds needed to be sitting on something. Second, I thought I wanted some medium-size leaves, and a vine twining around that branch would be a good place to anchor them.
The branch, though, provided an unintended benefit. I wanted a dark color, but didn’t want to use brown, as I had hoped to limit my palette to bright colors. So I mixed a raspberry red with a dark green and ended up with that pretty, dark plum. As it turned out, that color found nice places in the longish leaves on the right as well as the large heart-shaped leaves which look something like caladiums.
The small leaves and branches continued to be a problem, as I found myself working around them. By the way, I’d intended to work only with opaque colors, but, inevitably, some were more opaque than others. Among other things, this meant that sometimes I had trouble adding something in front of something else if the paint weren’t really opaque enough. I guess that’s a consequence of not planning, but it doesn’t make me think I should plan. The spontaneity of this piece was really enjoyable.
It’s hard to tell in the photo, but after I was done painting on day two, I added light gray colored pencil over all the white paper still showing. That made the white on the birds really pop.
On to day three, and the finish:
I added more color, including some shading and highlighting, to the birds. And now we have the leaves on the vine as well as many more of the clover-type branchy things.
All along, that big leaf in the bottom right, so disturbingly divided into a dark side and a light side, had been bothering me. But I’d decided to let it go until the solution presented itself. As you can see, I added veins, then decided to paint the other caladium-type leaf—as well as the little tip of a second one—and I think that worked really well.
I added some pink and turquoise dots in the background and also some tendrils swirling from the vine. I’m so happy with this piece, precisely because it’s happy! I’d like to do a bigger Parakeets in Paradise—maybe even as big as 18” x 24”, but with birds still this same (approximately life) size! And maybe in that one, lavender will play a role. We’ll see!
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This is gorgeous... It's happy and playful, well done!