Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve Studies

The last few weekends, I’ve been taking trips to the Oso Bay Wetlands Preserve, here in South Texas. If you are a bird lover like me, it’s a great place to observe many different types of birds in their native environments.

I want to share with you my process of painting when I paint from photo reference, as in this instance.

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From these reference photos, I made some quarter sheet paintings. The first set I want to show you is how I used a quarter sheet reference painting to make a larger half sheet work. Very often I will splice photos together to get compositional ideas.

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Using this technique I was able to put together a larger half sheet of this subject.

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This is one way to compose a work. It’s almost like sketching, but not quite.

In these next series of photos , I will outline my approach to a painting using a sketch. First, I look through my reference photos and isolate some nice shots of what I think will work in a compositional sketch. I then place them using my reference material. I immediately recognized that the flight of these Egrets was something I would like to capture.

There was one photo that captured the flight beautifully and that became my focal point for this painting.

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So, from these photos and the birds that were isolated in them, I made my compositional sketch for my larger work. In this next set of photos, you will see my process from start to finish:

I am pretty happy with the way things turned out. I would like to improve my washes which I think will tie in my paintings a little better. To me, they still look a little ‘pasted on’ so the transitions of tone could be better.

I hope you enjoyed this series of my work and happy painting!