| YARDBIRDS... | |
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The idea of birds in a birdbath began
with the letter being a T. Two or three years later, when I needed
a Y, Yardbirds was born. I also thought it might be funny if
at least one of the birds was drying off and another is cannonballing
into the water. Click on any illustration for an enlargement. |
| Sketchbook drawing using full-sized letter outline. I thought it might be ironic/humorous if the pedestal part of the birdbath was a sculpture of a cat holding up the basin ala Atlas. |
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Although still basically the same as the initial T thumbnail, the idea had evolved considerably by the time I finished this, the final drawing stage. I ditched the all-too-cute cat pedestal for a conventional one, there's five birds vs three and all the birds are now goldfinches. It was at this point the caption was expanded to Yellow Yardbirds. |
| Here
the application of water-based
dyes serves as the underpainting for the colored pencils. This time,
it also identified things for me--it wasn't until here that I could
really see what this idea was going to look like. |
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| The colored pencil stage where most of the work is done...usually. This time, because of all the revising in the earlier steps, it didn't seem so major, although I was not at all satisfied with the birds, which was especially unsettling because the colored pencil stage is very late the creation process. Most of the birds resembled baby ducks more than goldfinches, and baby ducks are not usually considered to be yardbirds. | |
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During this final stage of painting with (much needed) acrylics, I moved some beaks around and finally got rid of the ducks. I also went back to the Yardbirds caption...let the "yellow" connection to the letter Y be a subtle one. |
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| TECHNIQUE page | |
