Artistic Creation With A Southern Twist: Little Bird

I found this cute little birdy on Geninne's Art Blog and I thought I would try to re-create him. Of course, I can not do as well at Geninne but I thought that would just try. I washed the back ground out with a light purple.

I've never really drawn a bird but I think I did okay.

Then the painting began, and apparently I can not control my water colors. I messed up a little and then a little turned into a lot.

For those of you who don't know me, I am a perfectionist. It is already a huge feat for me to draw and it not be perfect but to just got with the flow - but to paint, and mess up like I did - I had to fight every bone in my body to know crumble this little birdy up and make him into a paper air plane. None the less - I confided in some of my art journal buddies - who gave me some great ideas - and marched on. I finished painting him and I used a bit of gesso to cover up the purple. That didn't turn out so well...and to make matters worse I got water on the rear end and smeared those colors.

EPIC DISASTER. I wanted to stop right then! But...I decided to try a sky blue acrylic wash. That was a fail in and of its self.

Then a light bulb came on - I can cut him out! Silly that I didn't think of that to begin with. So I tore the page out (which I hate to do in journals) and carefully cut my colorful birdy out. I then used some other watercolors besides my Peerless and did a color combination. (While playing with the epic disaster page, I figured out that bleach works really well with my Peerless Watercolors.) I also added a paint swatch that I got from Wal-Mart.

While gluing and cutting I devised a quote. I knew what I wanted to write but I wasn't exactly sure how I wanted to word it....I used my "cursive" and then I traced over and made the letters thicker - which is a trick I learned in my Letter Loving Class by Joanne Sharpe.

I was upset because I wanted to use a flower, and I have all of these cute little felt flowers but I didn't want it to be a color - I wanted it to be white. Well, while I was playing in bleach - I just threw a little flower in there and what do you know? A white flower. I traced it and put a black spot in the middle and I think that it pulls the entire page together!

Here is a close up of my bird: