Magpie - 52 Weeks of Watercolor Birds #Watercolor #52WeeksOfWatercolorBirds #ArtJournal

This week's bird for the '52 Weeks of Watercolour Birds' was the magpie.

Confession time.  I screwed up.  First I made the bad choice to use up paint on my palette.  It was from the Qor Landscape set - Transparent Brown Oxide, Venetian Red, Indigo, Naples Yellow, Raw Umber and Sap Green.

It's such a muted set of colors.  I used it for the Goldfinch, but added Hansa Yellow Medium to brighten it up.  This time though I put too much paint down, and felt adding the yellow would just muddy things.

I also tried making these birds into white-throated magpies where the white is in quite different areas. But compositionally this just wasn't working.  I'd already painted the white areas for a common magpie, so I ... *cue horror music* ... used white acrylic paint to cover the Indigo.

I'm not totally unhappy with the results, but I'll definitely think twice about using this particular palette again.


I found my reference photo at the Morguefile archive.

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