Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Bird of the Day- Woodpecker

Pileated Woodpecker- 6" x 8" -Digital over graphite by Greg Newbold
Another in the Egg book series. This one of the Pileated Woodpecker was a fun challenge. I was asked to make it look like the bird was attending to it's egg rather than pecking away at the tree. I decided the best way to do this was to have the woodpecker's head be silhouetted against the dark opening of the nest hole. It served the secondary purpose of creating a nice value contrast to lead the eye to the bird's head. I also had some fun with a little sunset lighting in the background. All of these were meant to be simple backgrounds in order to keep focus on the bird and the egg. The texture of the tree was fun to paint. Have a look at the drawing here.

4 comments:

Rob Colvin said...

These are all quite wonderful!

Unknown said...

Thanks Rob! Hope you are well! We should go painting sometime.

corsetti said...

Nice work as always ... where can I see the rest?

Unknown said...

Hi Rob,
All the paintings are now up on the blog. You might have to scroll forward or back but they are all up within a couple of weeks of this post.