I’ve had it in mind lately to paint a brightly colored bird and I thought I remembered a photo of one amongst the other things when I last was looking through the old box file. Sure enough I found an old picture of a parrot nestled under B for birds. I liked the scarlet reds and the vivid blues of this parrot. It hardly seemed like a possible combination for a real bird, but there it is.
I went the route of the frisket/spritzed ink, but this time I held a little back on the water in order not to muddy the overlayed colors too much. I played with the watercolor over two days and am fairly satisfied with it. I am less satisfied with the inking. There seems to be a very fine line between too much spritzing and a muddy, gray result and too little spritzing and too sharp of lines.
In this case, I think I erred in the direction of too little spritzing. The feather lines seem to be too delineated. I wanted to show more the suggestion of feathers rather than the actual feathers themselves, but that is not quite what has happened. I am not totally dissatisfied with the outcome, because I do like the colors but, like the blue abstract floral, it’s not quite what I wanted.