Eurasian Eagle Owl

Our new project for Wednesdays is a photo I recently took in Malta of a Eurasian Eagle Owl.  Falconry is an age-old tradition of Malta and I got to hold this guy on my arm and let him fly off to pick up some food in the distance.  They are a magnificent bird and up close they are awesome.

So, I wanted this to be an up-close and personal painting.  Some of my students drew him a little further back to avoid too much detail.  The colours of Malta, with their bright blue, green and yellow boats were the inspiration for the background.  I used Cerulean Blue, Cadmium Yellow Deep and Cadmium Red Light and just basically blobbed the colours all over the board.  I started with the very light colours and gradually made them darker.  I then made some shadow colours for an even darker tone e.g. blue mixed with a bit of red, green with a bit of red, and dabbed that into the dark colours on the canvas.  Whatever you do in the background, feather it off as much as you can for that out-of-focus look.