tui + kereru
Here are some studies, planning drawings for the my next painting. I was remembering the other day how when I was little I liked to imagine that the woodpigeons, because they had aprons, were the mummies, and the tuis, because they had bibs, were the babies.
And when you think about their personalities it is a little like that; one is so arrogant and beautiful and bossy, and the other is usually more quiet and cautious, but lovely in its own way.
(And there are so many many artists who beautifully render these birds (I love Jo Ogier's work), with whom I can't really compete... so mine will be bird-ladies.)
When I coloured these pigeons, I realized one of the hardest things to learn as an artist, for me anyway, is that nature doesn't happen in blocks of colour. We grew up doing a rectangle of green for the grass, a scribble of brown for the tree-trunk... but then you look, and see thousands of colours and it's really quite daunting, and I think I am often guilty of using the shade I think something should be, rather than what it actually is. In my head I always thought of woodpigeons as being a kind of uniform jade green colour but turns out they are actually quite a bit red-purple.
And when you think about their personalities it is a little like that; one is so arrogant and beautiful and bossy, and the other is usually more quiet and cautious, but lovely in its own way.
(And there are so many many artists who beautifully render these birds (I love Jo Ogier's work), with whom I can't really compete... so mine will be bird-ladies.)
When I coloured these pigeons, I realized one of the hardest things to learn as an artist, for me anyway, is that nature doesn't happen in blocks of colour. We grew up doing a rectangle of green for the grass, a scribble of brown for the tree-trunk... but then you look, and see thousands of colours and it's really quite daunting, and I think I am often guilty of using the shade I think something should be, rather than what it actually is. In my head I always thought of woodpigeons as being a kind of uniform jade green colour but turns out they are actually quite a bit red-purple.
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