Adding Color to an Acrylic Feather Painting

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Carolyn Travisano and I'm here to tell you about painting on feathers. I'm spreading out my reference so I can go back. The colors, you can keep them close to the original of what you're references are, but it doesn't really matter. You can use you artistic license and basically blend and use your own colors. It makes it more visually interesting if you're not using colors directly out of the tube, if you're making your own colors by blending and mixing. That's how I like to do it. We'll go in with the flesh color. It'll be the darker of the flesh colors because you want to work dark to light rather than light to dark. I'm going in and I'm going to add some darkness around the edge. The more that you work in the light and darks, the better and more dimension you'll get from the piece and more realistic. I like to work realistic to make it look as realistic as possible. We're going in and adding the darks. The back of the neck and under the chin area is very dark, so you want to show that definition there. You can go back later towards the end of your painting and really add your details in the hair. If you're doing an older person putting wrinkles in, that's more of the last stages you do other than adding depth by putting shadows in there. When I first started painting the feathers, it took some time for my eyes to get adjusted working so small and with such detail and small brushes, so I invested in a lamp. The lamp itself was a magnifying glass and there was light around it. I would actually work through the magnifying glass until I got used to using this size brush and having this much detail. We're going to let this dry, and we can actually move on to a different stage."