Painting Traced Artwork

Welcome back to the tracing art lesson.

(I already showed you the tracing part in >THIS POST<.)

This was were we left off.

After applying the charcoal drawing...

 the picture looked like this.

I started by painted the letters.

I did this because they were at the bottom,

and I didn't want to accidentally rub them off while

painting the picture.

After the lettering was dry,

I painted some detail on the robin and tree branches.

I made sure I took extra care to carefully trace his eye

when I had the original drawing taped on.

I have found that if the shape is correct

and

the eye is correct,

the rest of the bird creature will look

reasonably well

no matter if you add a lot of detail or not.

Get these two right,

and you are on the right track.

After the image was dry,

I painted the beak a light watered down yellow
and later touched it with a dab of orange.
I later did the same with the legs.

 I then  mixed a tiny bit of white with a small amount of black

and added a drop of water.

The consistency is wet,

but not puddling.

 I then brushed this onto the back of the robin

with sweeping strokes using a flat square-tipped brush.

 I added a touch of a slightly darker shade

on the top of the wings

where it looked darker on the original picture.

 I then carefully took a dry rag,

and just barely touched it to the painted bird

in light sweeping strokes

so that it would have slight color

but the detail of the wings would come through.

 (You can see here that when I painted the detail on the wings,

I used curved arch strokes for the top of the wings
as well as some light dry-brushed pouncing for shading.

I used straighter, longer strokes for the tips of the wings and tail.)

 I applied straight black paint to the head

 and then carefully dabbed some of this off as well.

 I added three spots of white around the eye:

a slight curve over the eye that widens just a hair toward the back of the eye,

a slight arch on the bottom of the eye that follows the curve of the eye 

from the lower front of the eye back slightly past the middle,

and a tiny triangle with the base toward the front of the eye.

 I then took a round brush and loaded it with slightly wet red paint.

 This was pounced on the belly of the robin

and stopped right before the leg.

 I dabbed some gray muddied white paint 

to the back leg area,

making the gray slightly darker where they are shaded by the

wing and of the robin.

I then painted the branches with a 

considerably wet brown paint

dabbing it up with a rag wherever it wanted to run or spread too much.

 When everything was very dry,

I took a dry clean paper towel and dampened it.

I rubbed this all over the painting to remove the charcoal sketch marks.

 I then added some brush stokes of a light green for leaves

in congregated places randomly along the branches.

 A touch of dark green was applied to the base of the leaves and spread upward

to give them shading,

leaving just a couple unshaded to give more realism.

 When the painting was completely dried

(a day later to be sure the paint can't be wipe off)

I gathered some Dark Walnut stain

and some
Howard Feed n Wax.
I read about using this combination on a blog
(which I will list here, when I can figure out which one it was;
if it was yours, please tell me).

I thought I'd see if I liked how it worked.
She said to use 3 parts wax to one part stain.

 I added just a touch of the stain to the wax,

finding that I still needed to ad another 1 Tbs. of wax

to balance the stain;

 I painted this carefully all over the board...

 being sure to get it into the cracks.

This then sat for 20 minutes.

I've read now that it should be allowed to dry

until it doesn't feel tacky.

Then the whole thing is rubbed with a clean, lint free cloth to buff it.

The artwork was then complete.

Next time I will show you the simpler version of just doing a silhouette.

I did this on the back of the board:

I like handy Christmas decorations.

I just have to flip the board around and I'm done!

It involves just filling in the whole shape with black

avoiding the detail altogether

while still looking quite nice.

Of course,

I do have some tips for doing this as well.
There was a terrible problem with this when I was done;
a tip that I can give you to spare you such an error.

It is probably quite obvious.

My husband and daughter were quick to acknowledge my fears
when I asked if they noticed,

so I will also show how it was fixed.

Until next time,

I hope you are able to enjoy a cheerful robin's spring song.

Linking to: