This week, a lot of my time was focused on finding, observing, photographing, and painting a couple of wood ducks in prospect park. It started when I got a picture of a female waddling around near the large lake in prospect park, but the male was nowhere to be seen. When I went home, I painted the female, and thought about where I would find the male. I thought about all the water ways I know in the park, and what sort of habitat wood ducks like. In the end, I believe I found a nesting couple near the Audubon center — there is a very calm pond and stream, surrounded by a fenced in area of woods, some of which are surrounded by water, offering some level of protection to the ducks nest. Wood ducks are cavity nesters, meaning they use holes in trees. 

But finding the birds was just the first step. I have been looking at Neil Welliver’s paintings recently, and am very inspired by how he does reflections on the water. Another thing I have been realizing is that I can really shape my paintings by how I take the reference. For the painting of the male duck, I wanted the side view while it was in still enough water for there to be a good reflection. It took me a long time of just waiting for the ducks to even get out of the woods, though by the time they did I had hopped the fence and was in a good position. 

After I was satisfied, I went home and uploaded the pictures. The other challenge is that, because this camera is 15 odd years old, even though I have a telephoto lens I can’t get a picture where you can see individual feathers unless I’m decently close. Once I had them uploaded, I chose one that would be my reference, and set to work painting it. I approached the actual duck similarly to kts female counterpart. Smallest brush, tight detailed painting. But with the water I did something more inspired by Neil Welliver. I did these sort of swirly undulating blobs of neutral color to simulate the reflection of the barren woods, and  I put all the duck’s colors into the water with a little bit of blue or green to create a perceptible difference. 

All in all, this day was very cool to me because I found, photographed, and painted the wood duck all in one day!