Watercolor bird painting on panel with watercolor ground

The next painting idea I had brewing for the panels was a teeny weeny kingfisher, The King of the River.

I used my White Nights watercolor pans for the painting. I used quite many colors on this one: Golden Deep, Cadmium Yellow, Quinacridone Rose Magenta, Ruby, Madder Lake, Bright Blue, Turquoise Blue, Indanthrene Blue and Payne’s Grey. I used the colors mostly as is, no blending in advance but I felt the layering of pigments, reworking the areas, mixing colors started to make the colors quite dull.

King of The River (2019) - watercolors on wooden panel — King of The River (2020) – painting on wooden panel primed with Daniel Smith watercolor ground (mixed media, watercolor and soft pastels). Wax finish. 40 x 40cm

In most of the bird’s body I used Turquoise Blue and the back with Bright Blue, but I felt the bird started to get quite de-saturated so I cleaned out the entire back, parts of the wings and repainted using Bright Blue in light layers with not much brushing. So now I got the back as bright as I originally wanted.

I tested the two colors (Turquoise Blue and Bright Blue) on random scrap paper, one slightly gradating wash and once dry I added an additional stronger pigment layer on top.

The color is not that different on paper vs. ground but the Turquoise just is less vibrant than I had thought of. Also the red background tones down the colors a bit more but I did not want to put the Daniel Smith Opera Pink to this one also (I fought against the idea). Both of the White Nights colors were fully transparent pigments.

So I ended up staring and reworking the bird painting quite a lot, more than the previous flower. Once I was satisfied, enough, I did the last details again with watercolor pencils (Albrecht Dürer) and called it done.

For the third painting I am first of all still lacking the idea, but also a bit disheartened and demotivated by the ground and getting eager to paint on paper for a change. I need to do a bit of pondering on the third one so I will likely paint something else meanwhile.

Some of the materials, wip and close shots: