Conversations in Avian Art and Ornithology

Rust can be a beautiful thing, as long as it is where you want it to be.  In creating Mourning the Past, I want to establish a textural difference between the bird and the rusty train.  I employ many watercolor techniques in my oil paintings.  The transparent pigments ultramarine blue, permanent alizarin crimson and Indian yellow are my main triad pigments.  I want to make my oil painting look more like watercolor, so I am experimenting with a variety of watercolor techniques like wet-in-wet and other texturing techniques.  After laying down a number of thin, mono-colored glazes of my transparent triad, I realized I was not getting a free flowing effect of water running down the side of the train and creating rust.

I applied diluted paint at the top of the canvas.  To get it to run, I kept adding more solvent and allowed it to run down the canvas.  You don't get the clean wet-in-wet mixing of watercolor on paper since the solvent does not permeate the canvas and must follow the canvas texture, but I was satisfied with the effect.

As with painting in watercolors, each glaze of transparent oil paint darkens the painting.  While darkening the train, I had lost much of my rust.  To bring some of the rustiness back I used the same technique but with semi-transparent paint like raw sienna and Winsor yellow.

I finished the dove, blended the background and straightened the train wheel and called it finished.

Mourning the Past

11 x 14 oil on canvas panel