#3 - Seagull

#3 - Seagull, Oil on Board, 8x8"

This is my third painting in the series of small works, and continues that animal theme.  It's from a reference we took at the beach in St. Augustine, Florida.

This darn bird.  It adopted us on the first day and was a pest because someone *cough* fed it some bagels or something.  It found us every day and just casually decided to hang out close by just in case any bagels might be heading its way.   If it got impatient, it would inch just a tiny bit closer and stare at us, accusingly.   Camera was handy, so it got its picture taken.

It didn't leave a tip.

In this piece, I wanted to work with the bird's values being both lighter and darker than the background.  But what absolutely made me happy was the discovery that the sand was actually BOTH light neutral lavender and honeyed orange.  Oh, man, that was cool.  I like this one, but weirdly, that painting of the background was the revelation to me.

See?  I learned something new.

Again.

Now what?   I think I'm going to move to some nifty 6 x 6 inch MDF squares to paint on next, and I am going to really follow this thought about the temperatures of color in the mid values as a device to push and pull form in a composition.   I'm tempted to delve into some landscapes, maybe using fog as a device to dampen down the contrasts and force very subtle shifts within a narrow value range.

Gesso time, then off to the races with this idea.

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