My son's Macaw, Cheeko

It's so much fun to paint my son's Macaw. Cheeko is all colors of the rainbow. In this painting, I wanted to capture the way Cheeko looks when he's really interested in something and about to pounce on it. My son said I captured the look really well. He also thought I captured a look of movement in this, with my "electric" lines. According to my son, I did good on this. :)

I keep practicing over and over, doing small paintings of this bird, so when I do the large portrait-I'll know what I'm doing. I send all these small paintings to my son, he has a lot of them on his wall!

There are maybe 50 layers of differing colors on this painting. You can't see them all, my scanner gets so confused when I ask it to scan something like this, it hates thalo colors for one thing. Another thing it hates are very subtle nuances of color. Like when I painted the beak and Cheeko's black feathers, I created the black from using all the colors in the bird. Green, red, orange, yellow, payne's grey, in many, many layers. The background is grey, but has so many layers of colors .... I love painting in layers and glazes.

So in real life, this painting is about 5o times brighter than it shows here. And Cheeko's head is green, more than blue...Wish you could see the real thing!
Donna Ridgway
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wildlife art, cow art, and animal paintings, my reference photosfor sale on my website.