All right gentlemen, the following is a basic breakdown of how I painted the scolding wood duck head. Let me start with this, I've painted many wood duck in the nearly thirty years that I have been making decoys. I've probably made more wood ducks than anything else, green wings could be a very close second though. After a while though I started looking for new ways to depict the colors rather than cranking out the same thing over and over again.
Now I'm going to get a little out there in this next part, and if you have a problem with somebody viewing decoys as art don't read anymore. But if you can view carved birds as another form of art then continue on. In 2007/08 Dale Chihuly, the world famous Art Glass maker and founder of the Seattle School of Art Glass, had an exhibit at the Phipps Conservatory here in Pittsburgh. At the time I believe this was only the eighth such exhibit he had done. Usually these are held in some fantastic setting and he had the glass artists who work for him create around 2000 new pieces for that installation. And believe it or not I went, twice, the first time in November 2007 during the day, and the second in February 2008 during the last week of the show at night. Seriously people travel from all over the world to see these exhibitions and we had to wait for about six weeks to get tickets the first time and we scored tickets for the final week the day we were at Phipps in November. Attendance broke all kinds of records. The colors Chihuly uses in the glass are indescribable. And being a little out there when it comes to art all I could see were the shapes of birds reflected in the forms and colors. Wood ducks in particular. Those two trips fueled my painting of wood ducks for the past two and half years. And thats where I started with this wood duck.
I carved this wood duck in a scolding pose so my thought with the colors was to show him all lit up with the idea that he is agitated. So that meant some more vibrant colors, but on the other hand I still wanted to keep him dark because that's the way I like to paint.
The first steps after carving and sealing were to lay down two coats of a good oil based primer. I use Behr oil primer, it's slow drying and finishes with good tooth. After a cure out time of about two days I blocked in the basic color outlay on the whole decoy and I just used some leftover green of some kind on the head. I paint tail to bill so the head was the last part to be completed. When I was ready I used a basic grisialle method of shading using a warm black made up from some Burnt Umber, Ultra Marine Blue and a little Ivory Black for the base color. The white highlights were just Unbleached Titanium soft blended into the darker areas with a Loew and Cornell Series 7200 10/0 micro fan blender. If you aren't using one of these run out to your local Michaels and buy some. I'll challenge anyone's airbrush with one.
I didn't take any photos of the wood duck in process but I do have a couple of photos of a sleeping mallard's head that I'm painting currently that is in the same stage as I just described. The photos are not the greatest, I had to use a cell phone, but you can see the basic idea behind them.
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After laying in the pattern for highlights and shadows on the wood duck I let it rest for about two days before I started the over glazing. Before I go on I think it's important to explain a little theory about painting in oils. The most important concept you have to grasp is, and I saw Steve Froehlich use this phrase on another web page, is opacity and transparency. What that means is some paint layers will not let light or other colors pass through, and some layers will let light and colors pass through and therefore be influenced by them. If you are still with me the process I used was to lay down transparent glazes over the shadows and highlights of the basic black, white and gray of the base head painting. I did four paint sessions over the course of about a week to get the color you see in this photo.
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The greens were built with succesive glazes of Thalo Yellow Green, Thalo Green Yellow shade, Thalo Green and some Naples Yellow for the extreme highlights. Towards the back of the crest I mixed in a little Ivory Black to the Thalo Green to get a darker background for the white "slash" feathers.
For the purples I used Diox Purple, Cobalt Violet Hue, Magenta, and I mixed a lot of varing hues of purple with Ultra Marine Blue and Rose Madder. If you notice the highlight of yellow just at the rear of the purple "comet" behind the eye I used just the smallest amount of Cadmium Yellow Deep Hue.
For the blues I used Ultra Marine Blue and Thalo Blue.
For the white "saddle" under the chin my base color was Unbleached Titanium highlighted with a mix of Unbleached Titanium and Flake White. A little word of caution about using Flake Whites, they contain Lead Carbonate, that's the famous "white lead" you read about from antique decoy days and require a little more care for disposal.
I fell that a key technique in my process is to use a fairly fine brush to add the paint colors to the spot being painted and the use the Loew and Cornell Series 7200 10/0 blender to bring the colors together. When doing this you only want to use the last fifth or sixth of the bristles. A very soft touch is essential.
One new technique that I used on this wood duck was to try and eliminate the use of white as a highlight in the more vibrantly colored areas such as the tail, flanks, back, head and breast. I was trying to think of new color combinations to make this decoy different than ones I've painted previously. I did have to use white in a few areas though as I could quite solve that equation this time. But that leaves me a challenge for the future.
This sounds real complicated, but the actual painting process wasn't nearly so. It just takes a lot of words to describe something that only takes a few minutes to do.
So here it is, if you have any questions ask away.
