Bird...painting

 When I try new things - new materials, a new medium or technique - as probably many artists, I often draw and paint human portraits. Just as often though, I do birds. They are great for trying something; they have simple shapes, are often colourful, and many are cute.
There is a surprising (or maybe shocking, given the quality of some) amount of materials around my studio that are nearly worthless, or at least no longer wanted, and whose mere presence irks me sometimes. I want to get rid of them, but I can't make myself throw them away, so the goal is to use them up; productively, if possible. The papers I bought for small charcoal drawings, the kind I do on conventions, are nice but some are better and some less so, and the less-so ones had to go. At the same time I had water-soluble oil pastels that were not quite so convincing, but I hadn't worked with them often, and fortunately also had a box of nice Faber-Castell oil pastels to supplement the former.

The oil pastels drawings are available in my Etsy shop.

I made a ref board from both nature documentary screenshots and great nature photos. The papers are loose A4 Fabriano Tiziano. I even got my significant other to start drawing the kea that I finished! It is pretty obvious that great reference makes for great drawings. I tried some trees with the same pastels but the fine detail was impossible to capture and I didn't like the results much.

During December '22 my art supplier's website had an advent calendar that among others offered a watercolour travel box. I had never had pro quality watercolours so that was necessary to get. It was a mind-blowing experience - my school supply watercolours from the stone age obviously don't hold a candle to artist's quality paints - and I completely fell in love with watercolours. Another series of birds helped try a few things; I started with blue budgies and later added some other birds as well. Mostly painted on the same paper I used for my small fantasy ink drawings but also snippets found in the drawers, and the top tier paper is the carton envelope of scratching board - yay for high quality supplies.