Chicken Four ways

However whilst I was in the Scilly Isles on holiday I had the pleasure of talking to some of the local artists on the islands, and although they were predominately landscape painters they did discuss various styles and techniques that they had tried and tested over the years to try and improve their work. With this in mind I decided that I would have a little experiment with using different mediums that I already had in my art box to see which would best suit the pet portraits that I love to paint, therefore we have a ‘Chicken Four Ways’.

This photograph is of Ginger, she is one of our chickens. I find chickens a difficult subject to photograph as they are never still for long and their movements are very sharp and unpredictable. However she became the subject for my experiment.

I used coloured pencil for this picture, the small size of the picture meant that very fine detail was difficult to achieve as the colour pencils used were very soft and slightly waxy, it was hard to keep a sharp point for drawing the sharp detail (I am sure though that these would probably great for creating a larger picture). I had to develop a technique and style to achieve the desired effect particularly on the feathers.

For my second offering I thought I would go back to basics and used a plain old simple graphite pencil. The result is a soft image that was easy to draw; the fine details were much easier to define than the colour pencil. However more thought had to be put into portraying textures to give the picture depth and interest to compensate for the lack of colour. It took me a lot longer to create than the previous picture.

Finally I used my usual tried & test medium of watercolour to create my final picture. Not surprisingly I found this picture the easiest to create. As a medium I love watercolours’ translucent qualities and the way that you can build up colour & texture that work particularly well when illustrating fur and feathers.

Every artist has their favourite medium to use, and I think that mine will always be watercolour. However I have had great fun experimenting and it was good to step out of my comfort zone for while and try something new.