Wash Coat Techniques for Bird Carving

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Learn how to paint realistic washes with this step-by-step tutorial. This instructional video demonstrates techniques for layering transparent color to build depth, dimension, and natural variation in your painting.

Transcript

In the course of painting, one of the things I often stress is when you’re applying acrylic paints in a wash coat type, for instance, if we’re in the middle of that pyramid that I had discussed where we’re coloring the body of the bird, we want to start from light to dark.

Rule of thumb when painting with acrylics in the wash coat application is always begin with the lightest tints of the color and progressively work from there deepening or shading the colors.

That’s how you’re going to reproduce that density and the depth that you’re looking for that is so elusive to most people on the surface of their carved bird or in their painting. If you want to achieve that depth, have to understand that you have to paint from light to dark.

When we proceed with the wash coat application, we’ll put a little bit, in this case, Burnt Umber. We’ll go back to my favorite brown, beautiful Burnt Umber.

When I do wash coat applications on a bird, I will typically use a wash brush. I like to use a rounded either a three quarter wash or a half inch wash. They’ve got an inch and a quarter length bristle on them.

Invest in good quality brushes because a little extra money that you spend in your tools will come back and reward you in the long term by giving you a much more satisfying painting experience. So, with my three quarter inch wash brush, I’m going to pick up a little bit of the burnt umber in the in the bristles of the brush, but when I begin thinning down my color, what I’m not going to do is add any type of a modifier. I am not going to add any flow medium. This is the flow medium that I introduced to you earlier.

Flow medium, think of as STP for paint. It’s a viscosity enhancer, but in the terms of just straight on wash coat applications, I found that it could sometimes modify the paint to a point of giving it a little bit of a sheen, and we want to avoid that. We want to keep our paints as flat and as matted as possible. So, in this case, burnt umber, I’m gonna dip my wash brush in some water and I’m gonna pick up just a little bit of burnt umber in the brush, making sure that it’s correctly metered on both sides.

I’m gonna touch it on top of my paper towel to control the viscosity because I don’t want it drippy or or too wet or it’s gonna run all over the place. So you have to constantly control the viscosity. And then holding your brush in as near vertical a position as possible, and I’ll angle this slightly, your washcoats should be applied with a See the beauty of the wash coat is in its thin translucent application and just metering out evenly held strokes.

You can see what a beautiful glaze that gives to it.

As the paint begins to dry, it will darken slightly. Be aware of that. So when you’re doing your washcoats, can control the intensity of the color and understanding that as your paint dries, what happens is the water is evaporating. As the water evaporates from the surface, the pigments the pigments are the reflective quality of the paint itself. The physical characteristics of paint pigment is what reflects the color wave back to your eye. We all perceive color a little bit differently but how you perceive a color is what your eye is telling you is reflective off of that surface and as the acrylic paint on the surface begins to dry through the process of evaporation, it will condense the pigments of the paint, combining them a little bit tighter and it will actually deepen and darken the color. So always keep that in mind when you’re proceeding with your wash coat applications.

The keyword to this is patience. You will get there. One of the advantages of painting with acrylics, or some people might consider it a disadvantage, is that you don’t achieve the final color immediately.

What you do is through the wash coat application, you have to be patient and you have to know that you will get there eventually in giving the paints a chance to do what they do best. When this relates to the surface of a carved bird, the benefit is the wash coat application, the water added to the paint pigments actually drives the pigment deeper into your texturing, enhancing the texturing that you’ve so carefully put in with a wood burner.

And so, you can use these two in concert to use the surface of that textured wood once it’s been sealed and gessoed properly in combination with light wash coat applications to really start to build that illusion of softness. And that’s the starting point to a beautiful, soft, believable finished product.

Progressing with your washcoats is simply applying one layer over another. Before you apply the second coat, want to make absolutely certain that your first coat is dry. Use a commercially available hair blow dryer, would work very nicely.

Take your time, relax and dry that surface because if you don’t dry that surface, what’s going to happen is with acrylic paints, if you start trying to apply a wet, watery wash coat over your first wash coat, if the first coat is not dry, it’s going to start lifting and you’re going to get what I call splotches. You’re going to get bright, light patchwork splotches. It looks terrible. So you have to be patient and let the washcoats do the work for you.

I am now going to take the next washcoat of Burnt Umber. Again, dip my brush in a little bit of water. I’m going to apply a little bit of Burnt Umber, the same amount about the consistency of Skim Milk.

No flow medium attached to this at all. I want just a pure pigment and good clean water. I’m going to give wash coat number two but I’m going to brush this in a perpendicular brush stroke so that you can see how the combination of this layering begins to build the intensity. Now, the intensity is the is the true principled feedback of that color.

It’s that richness that you see. There are some wonderful artists there that really have the ability to to just convey such a sense of intensity in their painting and it’s through the careful manipulation of their wash coat application when we’re painting with acrylics. So here we go. Same thing, burnt umber, a little bit of water, and a nice consistency, and then I’m gonna come across here and you can see look at the difference that occurs in the first coat as opposed to the second coat.

As I proceed and I begin amplifying these wash coats, you’re going to see the combination of this layering technique is what is truly going to give you that elusive depth in all of your carvings. A good analogy to this is to go out in the ocean and you can see the if you’ve ever flown over the Caribbean islands and you see those beautiful talcum powder beaches that are so white, pure white color, and then as the ocean begins lapping up on the beaches, you can see the color shift into that soft beautiful blue into almost a lapis lazuli coloring and it goes out into a deep beautiful deep rich blue color.

That’s simply manipulated light waves going down through the various layers reflected by many things in the water. It could be the salt, could be minerals in the water, but all of that gives you that illusion of depth in that water. That’s the same technique that we’re thinking about as we’re applying pigments to the surface. But you can see already just two washcoats and you can see the various stages of richness that occur.

Step by step and remember, always paint from light to dark.

As we progress with our washcoats, you’re going to see that you’re building the intensity and the richness of that color. Up to now, I’ve only done two washcoats, so let’s see what happens when we do a third. We’re going to pick up again our three quarter inch oval wash brush, burnt umber. I’m going to dry it slightly to control the wetness of the brush itself.

In the upper right hand section of this little crosshatch here, I’m going to do my third wash coat application and I’m going to show you again how the intensity of the browns can be built upon simply by using burnt umber and water. So here we go. Right up in here now we’re going to go again, just a very thin wash coat.

It doesn’t take much. Three to five, perhaps six wash coats is what you need to achieve that final richness. Now if I was doing the back of say a red tailed hawk or a golden eagle or certain other North American raptor species, I’d be very close right now to achieving the final coloration of the back. Where the true magic of this occurs is when you can manipulate or patchwork your intensity of colors.

Make some feathers lighter, some feathers darker. Remember, when you are painting a bird, birds don’t live in houses, they don’t take showers, they don’t groom themselves like you or I do. Birds live out in the environment. They are subject to ultraviolet rays from the sun, air blown dirt, debris, dust.

There are so many things in the environment that affect the coloration and the look of the bird’s plumage. Also, the time of year. Remember, birds molt their feathers. Some birds go through a twice a year molt, some go through just an annual molt, but in doing so, feathers come in.

New feathers are much brighter and fresher and newer looking than the old worn feathers. The age of a bird, its diet and its environment can really impact directly, on the look of the bird and the look of the feathers. So try not to make your bird look too perfect. Use this wash coat technique and vary the intensity of your colors in the application to the bird’s body.

I think that the results, if you take a little extra time and try to modify that a little bit and show some a little bit bit of interplay and a little bit of difference in the coloring and the intensity, I think your bird will look a lot more believable and it’ll look like he’s been out in the environment living a hard life. Living you gotta kill something every day as a raptor. That’s a tough way to make a living and so they’re they’re pretty tough birds, but this is a good way to show that off.

On the subject of washcoats, up to now I’ve been dealing primarily with earth tone colors, with burnt umber.

From time to time, you’ll have to paint birds or you’re going to paint a cardinal or maybe a beautiful Vermillion Flycatcher or even maybe a tropical macaw, a scarlet macaw or some beautiful birds that are not earth tone colors. So let’s take, say you’re painting a cardinal and you want to do the wash coat application, the wash coat theory as it relates to a cardinal. What I would do is I would start with just straight cadmium red medium because you can get cadmium red light, Cadmium Red Medium, and Cadmium Red Dark.

Now, Cadmium Red Medium is a good place to start because if you want Cadmium Red Light, rather than purchase a container of that at the art store, why not add just a little bit of white to it and that will tint it and that will give you your cadmium red light. So save a little money in that respect. So wash coat application is all the same. I would gesso the bird with white gesso first, let it dry completely, and then I would begin applying wash coats of my Cadmium Red, letting that dry and building up the intensity wash coat after wash coat.

Now, if the consistency is correct, again to that of about skim milk, just modified with water with no other additives like flow medium to it, I would say it would take probably six to eight thin wash coats of just cadmium red alone, cadmium red medium, to achieve that final tonal quality of the body of the bird that you want to do. Now cardinals, if you look at any male cardinal in its finest plumage, the coloring on a cardinal, you would see that there are various values of red. There’s darker through the back and the primary and the top of the tail and then through the upper chest region you get into some lighter tints, very different values of that basic red color and we’re going to follow that up with subsequent demonstrations.

Once the first wash coat has dried, it’s ready to apply the second wash coat. So let’s proceed with this. It looks like we’re reasonably dry at this point, so I’m gonna go ahead and I’m gonna give it another wash coat to slowly build that intensity.

So here we go. Perpendicular to the horizontal strokes that I just took. I’m gonna come in with some vertical strokes now and I’m gonna build the same. I’m using the same viscosity of paint on my brush but you can see now how the intensity and even the value is shifting slightly. I’m getting a richer, deeper feedback in my color.

When I’m using a primary color like red to paint, in this case we’re thinking about possibly painting a male cardinal in full adult plumage, there’s a time when you have to shade this red. Now, to shade the red, being a primary color, what we would do is we would go to our color wheel. We would look at red and we would go it’s exact opposite on a color wheel is what? It’s green.

To achieve green, we would mix two other primary colors, yellow and blue. In mixing the yellow and blue together, we would achieve a good mid tone green color, and then this green we would apply as a thin wash coat directly over the red and this keeps the purity of the wash coats intact. I wouldn’t mix this green with the red color on the palette. I would do my mixing and I would let your eye, I would apply these as separate washcoats on the surface.

Let your eye or the eye of the viewer do the mixing for them and that’s how they’re going to start reading the emotional feedback of the paint value and the paint intensity. So I’m going to mix and you can see a really nice green is coming forth through the mixing of these. In mixing these, what I’m using is just a flat toothpick. These are called Craft Picks.

They’re available at any art supply. I think I got these at a Michaels art supply but they’re a nice large flat toothpick and they really work well for mixing epoxies or mixing paints. I use a lot of these in my studio and I encourage my students to use them as well. So, we’ve got a nice mid tone green so let’s pick a little of that up and see what happens when we layer this over the existing reds.

So, here we are.

Beautiful. That’s a look how nice that green is. And I’m sure a paint manufacturer would love to sell you a tube of this, but here you are right here. So we’re going to take this green.

I’m going to dry my brush a little bit. We don’t want it too drippy wet. And let’s see what happens when we wash the complement to red green over the red and see what happens.

Two washcoats of red right now and we’re going to come back over it and we’re going to wash green.

As that green begins to dry, your eye is actually going to do the mixing of this, not the colors them selves because they’re succinct layers of color. So the light waves as they pass through the colors are going to come back to your eye and it is going to be physically mixed in the retina of your eye.

You can see the extreme modification that occurs with each successive wash coat of its complement. In this case, green over the red. It deepens it and it intensifies the shading of that red while losing its greenish qualities.

But like anything, you have to be careful and approach this with a little bit of caution because of too much green, of course, it’s going to start looking green. It all has to do with regulating and controlling the consistency and the value placement of that individual color. Conversely, if we wanted to tint that red, you see right now we’ve got two wash coats of the red giving us a very nice mid tone red. So, let’s go to the opposite track. Let’s tint that red and we’re going to add a little bit of white. In this case, I’m adding about twenty percent of white as a modifier.

All I did was add white and I’m going to come right alongside of it and beautiful soft rose color. A little more white to that mix gives us an even softer, just the most beautiful subtle pink color you’ll ever see.

A little more white, maybe perhaps a little bit of water mixed to it, and you can see our translucent wash is ever so slightly tinting it and making it look much more dainty. So, simple addition of either white or its complement can really give you a tremendous range in any of your complement colors, in any of your basic primary colors that is, your yellows, your reds, your blues. Those could be modified tremendously through the addition to tint them only the addition of white or regarding the primary colors again, red, yellow, blue to shade any of those. Never add black or brown. You want to add their complement.

Layer their complement on top and let your eye do the mixing and I think that the result in concert with a good textured surface of your bird will really give you that illusion of softness and that beautiful shading that you’re after.