I've been a professional artist for about 5 years now, I launched my Etsy shop December 2020, so I guess it's more like 4.5 years. In 2021, I painted a kingfisher. It wasn't great, but it sold instantly for £40, I was over the moon! It was the 2nd original piece I'd sold as I'd been mostly focussing on lino prints up to this point. Around the same time the next year, I happened to paint another kingfisher, I'd remembered the first one and compared pictures. I was pleased to see some good progression. For the first 2-3 years I was only managing to paint a few birds each year as my focus was on the lino, so progression slowed.
I decided to keep up the annual painting of the kingfisher, and have painted one every Summer since. Here's the first few.
I hadn't given this year's kingfisher much thought, but then on one of the local birding Facebook groups I'm in, I saw a wonderful picture of two juvenile kingfishers from a local nature reserve, taken by talented wildlife photographer Gildas Griffiths. I knew I had to paint it as soon as I saw it, I reached out and asked for permission, which was kindly granted. Here's the various stages of the painting.
I started by sketching - I'll admit, this took 3-4 attempts to get the sketch both the right size, and centred on the paper. Once that was done, I added the background and included the base layers of both birds. After that it was a case of building up the tonal value and detail one layer at a time. I focussed on the top bird first (for the most part), then moved on to the bottom one.
I'm so happy with how this turned out - I think it's one of my favourite paintings I've ever done. The colours, the granulation of watercolours, the definition of the birds, the composition of the original image - it all came together perfectly.
A big thank you to Gildas for allowing me to use his photo. If you like bird photography, you should check out his portfolio. If you'd like to see the original reference photo, you can see it here on his Facebook page.