My first acrylic painting - a Rainbow Lorikeet

This is the first painting that I've done for the Acrylic Painting I class that I'm taking. I used a photo taken of a Rainbow Lorikeet by my mother-in-law in New Zealand. The purpose of the assignment was to capture the colors of a photograph so the bird was an excellent model given the colors it had.

I'm new to Acrylic painting so this was very much a trial and error process. I first sketched the bird with a pencil then filled it up with paint using a 1/2" flat brush, a 2 brush and a 6 brush. By blending 9 different paint colors (Ultramarine Blue, Phthalo Blue, Cadmium Red, Quinacradone Magenta, Cadmium Yello, Hansa Yellow, Mars Black and Titanium White) I was able to come up with colors as close to the original photograph as possible (for me). I did request an exception to the background of the bird which was a blurry green forest that I thought would clash with the feathers. I also took some liberty on the branch to minimize the amount of work. Since the focus is mainly the bird, the instructor was okay with the revision that I've done.

There was a lot of blending and layering! In the beginning I probably spent more time blending than actually painting. Once I started to get familiar with it I was able to spend more of the time painting. The great thing about acrylic is that it's mostly opaque (there are paints that are transparent, e.g. Hansa Yellow), so any mistake can be corrected by simply painting over it. Titanium White is the most opaque paint, which allows one to use it to paint over a large section if one wants to just start over. The not-so-great thing about acrylic is that it dries super fast. We're talking a few minutes here. The only way around it is to blend in a slow-dry agent which slows down the drying process but also changes the body of the paint to be a little gummier. Actually come to think of it there is another around the drying problem, which is to paint super fast like Data from Star Trek the Next Generation.

Here is the original photograph the painting is based on:

Sure, my bird can stand to lose a little weight in the front and behind, and I wasn't able to do a good job on the feathers. But I'm fairly happy with it given that it is my first painting using this medium.

It was well received at the critique and the instructor really liked the way I painted the head. I already got my next assignment which will be a lot more work and challenging. It will also be completely my own creation and not based on any photograph or other ideas. I'll be sure to post that when I finish it.

So far, loving the class!