This is a bird. This is a portrait of Icarus, my pet cockatiel, when she was under a year old.
I obtained Icarus in the summer of 2015. Her precise birth date is unknown, but is believed to be roughly Christmas of 2014 or six months before I obtained her.
I painted Young Icarus in the fall of 2015. The technique used was to take an intermediate photograph of the object, in this case a bird that cannot stand still, and paint the portrait from that. I converted the photo to grayscale to make it easy to judge what is known as value, which is the darkness of an image component, and actually painted a grayscale background to start with. Afterwards I painted color over top of the grayscale painting to arrive at the final image.
We use this technique often when painting life scenes; more often I do it when painting landscapes and still lifes but it also works good for portraits should one attempt to paint an animal or human. This technique allows a painter to obtain relatively correct darkness values as well as correct adjustment of component placements. Usually far more time is spent on the background grayscale draft than on adding the color over top, which proves surprisingly easier than the draft every time I do this.
As an interesting note about this painting, the photograph itself was obtained many weeks before I started the painting, which I worked on many Sunday afternoons in art class. After it was done, there came a session where both Icarus and the painting were both in the studio–I had to hand the bird off to a friend for caretaking while I was traveling–and somebody noted that the components of the painting didn’t match proportionally to the actual bird. I was still right in this case, and pointed out that Icarus was young, and young birds grow quickly. It had been months since the photo was taken.
An interesting thing about cockatiels (and from what I understand, many other pets as well), is that it is nearly impossible to determine the gender of the animal at birth short of a DNA test. One is left to guess; in this case, Icarus was assigned a male name.
As a reader and probably a pet owner, you know exactly where this is going. Icarus now goes by the “she” pronoun due to a particular event during the winter days of early 2017. A relative was attending to the bird nightly at the time as I was…let’s just say I was out of town, okay? I received news via telephone that a couple eggs were discovered in the bottom of the cage.
You can cue Johnny Cash now if you wish. Icarus has not requested a new name, though if she does I would be willing to give it to her. For now, she still goes by the name Icarus.
