If one bird is not enough, we can have two and call it a couple. For “Bird Couple”, we have a 12-inch square canvas with two birds sitting happily together on a stick, enjoying a lovely good time together.
The technique used to portrait the birds…get this…was to look at an image in a calendar! Want to know what an outdated calendar is good for? Art practice! Calendars happen to be a ready and cheap source of architecture or still life imagery of excellent color and artfully correct layout with zero overlays, so we always keep a bunch around for art class.
I’ll share another interesting secret about this one. In the original image, the birds are actually sitting on a complex sunflower, and the stick was not there at all. The complexity of the sunflower was well out of scope for the intended painting, however the poses of the birds required that something be provided for them to sit on. I chose a simple stick, since sticks are relatively easy to free render from the mind and yield little distraction beyond the simple purpose of a perch.
