I had an email from Lesley M yesterday, she says, "I've realised what went wrong with the 'boats'. I combined two photos and concentrated on getting the horizons at the same level then drew the individual boats etc., etc. The one thing I didn't study was the perspective and the angle from which they were taken. The right hand boat was photographed from below, looking up slightly, the left from standing or even looking down. When I stuck the two photos together there was quite a big gap between the boats and the different angles weren't nearly as apparent as in the painting where I had to put the boats close together to fit on the paper. I wish I'd stuck to one boat!
I've gone back to small and fiddly and did two Billy tutorials, one a blue hens egg and the second a 3.5 cm quails egg both of which I'm attaching.
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Well done with these paintings Lesley, both are good and show the "roundness" of the eggs well.
Well done too that you have worked out what went wrong with the boats, This is a very valuable lesson, and one that can really only be learnt by experience. Often when composing a painting we decide to remove, or add, something and you now know that there are pitfalls to doing this. It may not guarantee you getting it right every time but at least you are now aware that different perspective, lighting and shading can all affect changes that you make.
It is interesting that you have painted a blue hens egg. We have one hen that lays blue eggs. They are slightly smaller than those our other hens lay but just as delicious. On Monday Steve collected three eggs from our birds and whilst he was changing their water he left them on the patio, in the bucket with a small amount of layers pellets under them. Just as he finished doing the water the heavens opened with rain and hail so he ran indoors completly forgetting the eggs. Later when he went back for them they had gone and there were just three indentations in the pellets! We suspected the crow but there was no shell or yolk on the pellets and we thought he, or she, would have had to break them. On Tuesday we decided to set up the wildlife camera and leave one blue egg in the same place in a cat bowl and see what happened.
Within about half an hour the egg was gone! Guess what we found on the camera?
Wow! I, like you, would have expected it to eat the egg/eggs there and then I certainly wouldn't expect it to fly off with an egg. I suppose they've got chicks and an egg is a fantastic meal for young chicks. x
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