Yes, I missed last week’s Friday-Art-Day submission. Not because I didn’t have any art done, it just completely slipped my mind as I’ve been transitioning between moving to Toronto briefly for a new job teaching at an international school, and traveling back and forth to home on the weekends.

However, I’m back in fine order with a new oil painting to show you of a blue and yellow Macaw Parrot. I’m quite satisfied with this painting because I was able to complete it relatively quickly, in about twelve hours – which is stunning to me. I’ve always been a very slow laborious painter and I’ve been practicing forcing myself to work faster. Sometimes you get comfortable trying to make everything look just perfect – and while I still have that standard in mind, I’m constantly trying to push myself to work faster. The faster I can do something, the more affordable it is for me to produce something, making it more affordable for you to buy, and making it more reasonable to allow me to do this in my spare time and hopefully one day as a full time position.

MACAW PARROT – FOCUS ART – I’m quite proud of the amount of realism I was able to produce in the beak area. Another interesting thing to notice is the hidden shades of colour in the white of the face. It isn’t white at all, but entirely blue, pink and purple. It’s just an illusion to make the face look rounded.

Anyways, I’m not sure that I was able to achieve the true vibrancy of the feathers as I wanted, but that was due to the limitations of the blue pigments that I had. I have about 7 or 9 different blue hues, and this is the closest I could get to their true colours. I also discovered with this painting that the oil paints really like to mix with the pencil lines, so I need to be careful how thickly I draw them in area’s that are meant to be bright and colourful. I never noticed the struggle before because my other two previous paintings were darker.

I’m quite proud of how the beak turned out on this fellow, in person it’s difficult to tell that it isn’t just a photograph. There are other area’s in the picture that give it away that this is a painting, but that beak sure is something. At least I think so. I’m also happy in the way I was able to paint the face. I took a ton of photo’s of my process, which I’ll try to put together this weekend. While painting the face I began with the white area’s, except they were not white at all, but coats of light pink, purple and blue. It wasn’t until I added the black around them that they flattened and the true colours became hidden once again. But that was my intention. Lot’s of people look at something for how they think it is, but it isn’t until they actually look at it that they’ll notice it may be something completely different… like the shade of white being multiple colours to create a shaded round effect.

Here you will see the amount of colours I used to make the white area of the face look shaded and round.