Painting and Mixing Colors

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In this painting tutorial, learn how to mix and apply colors to create realistic, natural-looking results on a carved bird. The demonstration covers color selection, paint mixing, and application techniques to help build depth, dimension, and lifelike detail.

Transcript

When you’re painting your bird, unless you’re doing a pure black bird like a raven or a crow, I like to gesso the bird first. Now gesso, you have to be careful when you go into art stores, gesso can come in different colors. When I refer to gesso, I’m referring specifically to white gesso. Gesso, unlike your standard paint pigments, is made very differently.

Gesso is ground marble dust, microscopically ground, mixed into an emulsion and it provides the base for your painting. The visual effect of gesso is much nicer and pleasing to me as a bird carver because it has a softer look to it than say titanium whites or some of the ivory whites that you can buy commercially, which can tend to be a little bit reflective. White is a reflective type color or non color for that matter. And when I buy my gesso, I transfer it into a little squeegee container like this with a pointed cap.

The reason I do this is gesso has a bad habit of when it dries it becomes very flaky and crumbly. Gesso when it’s purchased typically comes in large wide mouth containers and if you open it and close it frequently and draw from that container, the gesso around the edge of the container will dry and start to crumble and flake, fall into your the fresh gesso in the container. It can really cause problems when you’re trying to apply it to the surface of your carved bird because it could leave little bits and remnants of pieces in there and you don’t want that. You want as perfect a surface as possible.

So, the surface of this board has been gessoed and I want to talk to you a little bit about the simplicity of mixing paints and two terms to remember, tint and shade.

When I speak to you about painting and mixing colors, I’m not going to be talking much about darkening a color or lightening a color, I’m going to be talking to you about tinting a color and shading a color.

The foundation of painting most North American birds is the earth tone colors. Your umbers, your oxides, your ochres, and your sianas. These are the colors in combination that will constitute the color and plumage of most, not all, most North American bird species. Of course, with bluebirds, cardinals, goldfinches, we’re going to be talking about other colors entirely, but right now, let’s deal with just the basic earth tone colors.

For demonstration purposes, I’m going to take Burnt Umber. Burnt Umber is a beautiful chestnut, a rich chestnut brown color, and I use it a lot, probably more than most any other color in my in my whole painting selection. I go through a lot of Burnt Umber.

Burnt umber has a slight reddish color to it, unlike raw umber, which I refer to as dirt in a jar. So these two are very different type earth tones and you have to be careful when you’re deciding on which to use.

A good remembrance of this is burnt umber. Think of burnt, reddish burnt, the mallard duck, male mallard duck drake has the beautiful chestnut breast color. That’s what I always think of when I pick up a container of burnt umber.

So when we apply burnt umber on its own, I’m going be doing all of my application with a three quarter inch oval wash brush. When we’re doing our wash coats, I keep the paint application very thin about the consistency of skim milk. So first, always dip your brush in water to lubricate the bristles. If you put a dry brush into paint pigment, being air drying type pigments, the paints will dry immediately to the brush bristles. And that will inhibit the flow of the paint off of your bristles. So always dip your brush in water first.

Just tap it a little bit on your paper towel to wick off some of the excess water and you’re ready to go. And I put a little bit of my Burnt Umber down on my palette here And I’m gonna show you just for demonstration purposes the magic of tinting and shading Burnt Umber. So let’s take a little bit of Burnt Umber on its own and we’re gonna just put a little streak of it right up here and you can see what a beautiful rich color that is. Now, to begin tinting that color, you can only truly tint or lighten a color through the addition of white.

If you add anything else, pink, yellow, anything, it will modify that color and shift it and change it visually. The only way to truly tint or lighten a color is through the addition of white. For my whites, I only use gesso. I like the soft quality of gesso. So, I’m going to add a little bit of gesso to that brown.

And right next to that now, I’m gonna tint it and you’re gonna see how that shifts the color of the brown. With the addition of more gesso, we are gonna progressively tint that color and you’re gonna see that right along, we’re going to start moving into a whole different type of color. Now, if you were in an art store, I’m sure that the paint suppliers would just love you to buy a tube of every one of these colors and I’m sure they have a very cute little name for all of these too. And as you add more white, we come into more like this.

So you can see the progressive tint to that burnt umber. Just with the addition of white, I’ve already given myself five different values of that base tone burnt umber just by adding white. If you’re in an art store, you would look and this would probably be called, say, light Van Dykes brown. This would probably be called Cape Cod driftwood.

This would be called sandalwood, and maybe they would come up with a name, you know, Cape Hatteras sand dune brown or something like this. And they would just love you to buy a a container of this. So let’s add some more white and see what happens. And we’re gonna continue to work to the left here, and lighter we go.

Lighter we go, and so forth and so on until we were just about into the pure white stage of this. And each one of these colors is available at the store but if you learn to just add white to a color, you’ve already saved yourself a whole lot of money. The top row, starting with basic burnt umber color, you can see the transition that occurs simply with the addition of various percentages of white. In this case, I’m using gesso.

That is tinting and you see the different graduated value scale that occurs just by adding white and tinting the color. Let’s take the opposite tract and let’s start shading that burnt umber. Again, I’m going to start with basic, a swath of just plain Jane burnt umber, just like on the top there.

Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret. One color that I don’t use is black.

Black to me is evil. Black sucks and everything and it gives nothing back. It has no life to it. If you want a beautiful rich black color, just add blue and I’m going show you how that works. So if you want to shade your burnt umber and if say you’re carving an eagle and and you wanna paint those feathers of an eagle, you don’t just put one value of brown all over the whole body of the eagle. You will incorporate different tones to the eagle to give it a little bit more visual believability.

You can do that by shading the color and to truly shade any earth tone color, you do not add black. Do not add black to any color, you’ll kill it. You add its complement or in the case of an earth tone like your ubers, you would add Ultramarine Blue. As I add progressively a little bit of blue, watch how it modifies that burnt umber.

I’ve just added maybe twenty percent Ultramarine Blue into the burnt umber and already you can see that it starts to take us into a rich, deeper black color. When we go ultimately to fiftyfifty Ultramarine Blue Burnt Umber, you will achieve almost a pure, rich, black color without the deadness of the true black pigment. This will give you back something. For all of your hard efforts, this and we don’t have to do as far a transient value scale with this.

You certainly can, but the addition of the blue, rich black, and I’m telling you what, you would look at that color and you would swear that you’re looking at just a jet black color. Now, watch what happens when we start to shift the balance of percentages over in favor of the blue, it starts to pull it into a dark blue phase and you’re going to start to see a little bit of the blue pigment come through with the brown modifier in it. Now, if I want to deepen the blue color, on the other hand, if I’m doing a blue jay or a, say, a Stellars jay or maybe a Mountain Bluebird and I want to paint various values of blue on that and I want to do some shaded areas to show some depth, I will simply add a little bit of Burnt Umber to that blue.

And more blue.

And you can see the tremendous variation in color value that it gives you simply with the addition of those one to two colors.

When I’m mixing my colors or I’m blending to paint any of my birds, rarely do I mix more than three colors together. Now I know that there are some very, very good artists out there that that have techniques that they teach where they blend a lot of different color together. My personal feeling about this is like if you’re making soup, if you start adding too many spices into the soup, they’re going to start competing with and canceling out each other and what you’re going to be left with is swamp water. And I think many times if you just take a bunch of colors and mix them together ***** nilly on your palette, you’re going to come up with a deep disgusting gray color and nothing else.

And that’s happening because the pigments are cancelling each other out and they’re not being allowed to fully show their true radiance and color. So just like in your work area and just like your thought process when you’re painting, it simple and proceed in a very simplistic manner and remember your percentages and write it down.

Quite often I’ll keep a little notebook next to my painting area and if I come up with a mix that I really like, I will make a note and I’ll notate twenty percent. Gesso maybe mixed into a little bit of Burnt Umber gave me a certain value of light brown, maybe a soft mocha color that I like for a certain bird. And that way I have a register of it for future use so you’re not always experimenting. This is how you learn.

You learn by doing. Use paints, get in your studio, push them around, make mistakes, make a mess, come back, and that’s the progress, always forward progress of the learning curve. You you only learn by doing, and, so get in there and do it and get your paintbrush dirty. And remember at the end of the day always keep it nice and clean.

That’s important.

Another commonly used color for painting North American birds is burnt sienna. I love burnt sienna. It’s a rich reddish brown color and it’s just one of my most called upon colors and I think that it’s very beautiful. And for demonstration purposes, I’m gonna show you a little bit about how you can modify that through the tinting process. Just by adding a little bit of white, you can shift that burnt sienna and make it do anything you wanna do.

So again, we’re gonna go back to our three quarter inch oval wash brush and we’re gonna just take some straight burnt sienna and we’re gonna apply a little look at that gorgeous rust red color right there. Beautiful red tailed hawk tail feather color I call that. Now, if we wanna tint that, we’re gonna begin adding a little percentage of white to that. So just a touch of white. Let’s see what happens when we add just a a little touch of white and how it modifies it. So I put in about ten percent white to that mixture and look what happens right there.

Ten percent white, so let’s add a little more white. Maybe bump it up to twenty five percent white.

And again, we’re gonna come right across the scale here and add a little bit more.

I encourage you to try this in your own studio. Sit and just add white to certain colors and see how fine you can get that graduated process to be. The better you get at this, the better you can translate this when it comes time to committing to painting your bird carving.

I’m always surprised that people that are involved in bird carving give very little thought to painting until it’s time to paint what they’ve just spent months sweating and working so **** ** the carved bird. Then they think, now I’ve got to paint. That’s the only time they think about painting. When in reality, you should be sitting and devoting quite a bit of your studio time to learning to paint and it comes with just pushing colors around.

So I’m adding a little more white to this burnt sienna and look, we’re almost into a flesh tone color now. If we add a little yellow to this and just a touch of blue, it would give you almost a perfect flesh tone color. You know what else this works beautifully for? The inside of mouths of most birds.

If you’re doing an open mouth on a raptor and you want to get that beautiful internal color or a songbird, simply mix burnt sienna with a little bit of white, various percentages, and then you can modify that with just a little bit of red and perhaps blue. And I’m going to show you how that works right now.

While we’re on the subject, we’ll take a little bit of red. Now, I’ve mixed just a touch, maybe five percent cadmium red into this mix.

And now, we come into what I call a beautiful flesh tone color.

A little bit of a little bit more of the red in there, and you can see how the red modifies that burnt sienna and gives you more flesh tone. Then with the addition of blue, blue gives it a little bit more, what I call a more believable look. It deepens it a little bit, but it gives it more character with the addition of blue. There we go right there.

All of these different shades can help you also when you’re when you’re doing portrait painting. Flesh tone colors, very handy to do. A lot of the feet of younger birds, immature birds, haven’t achieved the coloration of the adult yet. Quite often, lot of them have this flesh coloring in the feet, in the open mouths, and in the sear, eye rings. It’s a very, very handy thing to know how to do. But again, all of these colors, if sold commercially, would have very fancy names attached to them, and they would have price tags of five to seven to ten dollars per container. So just by learning to modify a little bit of the basic color, you can save a lot of money and you can open up a door to new possibilities in your own studio with very minimal use of paints.