Painting Prairie Chickens--Part One

It's been awhile since I've done a painting in progress for you all. It isn't that I haven't been painting. I've painted a lot, thanks in part to my resolution to blog less and paint more. For a good step-by-step blog series, I have to be working on a larger, more complex painting, because there's not all that much to say about painting small illustration vignettes.

So when I was asked to paint the poster art for the Lesser Prairie-chicken Festival in Woodward, Oklahoma (for which I will also be presenting a keynote and workshops April 16-21), I thought that would be the perfect subject for a step-by-step treatment for the blog. Here's how it came out.
Original is 14" x 18"

As with all of my watercolors, I cook the painting in my head for a long time--sometimes months--before I take brush in hand. In this case, I'm pleased, looking back on my initial thumbnail pencil sketch, to see how closely the final painting adheres to the original concept. Of course, it never turns out exactly as I've envisioned it, and I might take a completely different approach if I had world enough and time to do it over, but I try mightily to get close to the vision.
And the vision was action, drama, and low dawn light.


The day I started work on it was dark and rainy, and I had left my good camera in town, drat! So I fuddled through with a couple of unfabulous shots of the opening washes.

Of course, I've masked the birds out with film and liquid masking compound, so I can paint freely over them without sullying the paper where they'll be.
This part is always kind of scary, wondering if you've sealed the edges of the masking film sufficiently to keep your wild wet washes from intruding. (I hadn't.) Not to mention that you're doing an underpainting in a bright color that has little to do with the final look of the piece. Yikes.
Today, having just put the final touches on the painting, I'm SO glad it's done. There's a whole lotta work between this splashy, fun-looking part and the finished painting. This one turned out to be a weeklong mama bear of a project. The original is 14" x 18," which is pretty big by watercolor standards.
Obviously, I did a lot of work between the splashy yellow stage and this next one, but it was pouring outside and I couldn't take the painting out to photograph it. Also, I forgot about photographing it. When you're wrestling with grass, the nemesis of many a wildlife painter, you have to just get down and deal with it.

While grass-wrasslin', I paint a wet-on-wet Oklahoma prairie landscape and sky behind the grass. That came out OK. Back to the grass.


I hate painting grass. Always have, probably always will. It's so easy to get too mechanical with all those little blades, and it's really, really hard to paint them so they look acceptably real but not repetitious. It's important to vary your color. I probably varied mine a bit too much here. Whatever... I know I'm going to err, so I try to err on the side of going too loose and splashy with it. At least that way it won't end up looking like a plugged hair transplant.

There's this tension in many of my bird paintings between the rendering of the bird, which is usually pretty tight and specific, and the rendering of the habitat, which is often much less so. The tension comes when there's too great a disparity between the two. You don't want superrealistic birds in a completely loopy landscape.

The other thing that's going on here is that my vision for the birds includes strong backlighting, the kind of low, intense light you get at sunrise. Above all, the painting has to say sunrise, because that's when prairie chickens get busy on their booming grounds. So I'm continually darkening and darkening the foreground because I want the birds to be lit up against it, and to pop out of it. That's why we're looking at purple grass here. I have to keep the faith while painting purple grass that this is all going to work out in the end.

Next: I move on to the birds, but keep working on the grass. Always the grass.


I got a very special Valentine from Chet Baker when he waded out this morning through belly-deep boilerplate snow and presented me with some (dog) chocolates. This, after four days of holding out. I had shoveled a Pee Alley with foot-high walls right out the front door, but the little gentleman much prefers the back meadow for more important business. You all have my permission to exhale now; I know you were waiting to hear this, and worrying right along with me.

I have been shut inside this house with my school-free kids, our brains slowly liquefying, for oh, about a month too long, and heard this morning there might be another 8" on the way. Of snow. Eight more inches of snow. Isn't that romantic?

Here's wishing you a happy Valentine's day. For those of you who get to spend it in a tete a tete in a fancy restaurant, drowning in wine and red roses with someone you're mad for, good for you. Good for the fancy restaurant, good for Hallmark, good for the florists. For we ordinary mortals, whether you're kissing a human, a horse, cat, dog, bird, or small furry rodent,** just make sure you kiss somebody, and tell them you love them.



**this list not meant to be comprehensive