How to Work Feathers for an Acrylic Painting

Video Transcript

"Now, when I'm painting the feather, they're not super delicate, but you do have to be careful with them because sometimes you can actually break the quill. It's not a big deal, but if you're going to resell them, you shouldn't have any type of damage to it. Another thing I wanted to mention is about the design or the flaws of the feather. Sometimes what you'll see will happen is you start painting and the feather starts drying with the paint on top of it. The feather might start coming apart or separating. It doesn't bother me at all because I believe it adds interest to the feather. With this particular one, you'll see where in her hair the feather started to separate. There's different ways that you can fix that, but I particularly like to keep it that way just to show interest in the feather or different things about the feather. As far as it coming apart there, it should be fine. As I paint it, I basically hold it down in the center on the quill. I start laying down a little bit more color. We started our pallet. I normally have 2 or 3 of these little pallets spread out for different tones. Also, if I'm working on more than one feather, I'll probably have more than one pallet. One per feather. Again, you don't want to use too much paint. This in fact, is a little bit too much paint that I like to use because it'll probably dry up before I use it all. With this design I'm using 3 or 4 different ideas for him."