Expressive watercolour painting of a tufted titmouse

How do you interpret a beautiful but super detailed photo in an expressive fashion??

In my private members on line meet up, I demo’d how to paint this beautiful blue tufted titmouse following a question posed by a member who had discovered this lovely photo.

Painted with primaries plus black. Winsor and Newton: manganese blue hue, Winsor blue (green shade), quinacridone magenta, Winsor lemon and lamp black. White gouache, white gel pen, black micron 0.05 and coloured pencils for additional marks.

So here’s my method broken down…

✅ Always start with the largest shapes first, the cleanest colours, the softest edges and the biggest washes. The first layer was painted wet into wet. I added clean water first and then dropped the paints in. You can achieve beautiful lost and soft edges during this phase. I’ve found that if you use cotton paper, your paper will tend to stay damp for longer too

✅ In the next layer I added the eye to anchor the piece and to help me assess those tricky mid tones. I painted wet onto dry and loosened up my paint with water. I started adding desaturated tones too.

✅ In the final layer, I loosely interpreted the various shapes and pushed some of the colours. I used gouache, gel pen, micron and coloured pencils. This stage was a lot of fun. This is where the detail happens!