Pigeon Painting: Unseen Beauty

I visited Washington DC in April with my dad because his old college hockey team was playing in the Frozen Four. While I was there, I snapped a lot of photos, many of the resident birds, which everybody made fun of me for. Most people come back from DC with photos of buildings (boring) and I come back with 2/3 photos of: sparrows, starlings, ducks, gulls, and of course pigeons.

Final Painting: "Unseen Beauty"

The day we went to visit the Lincoln Memorial, we stopped by a “food” stand for some water. I say “food” because most of these types of snacks are not real food. Because of all the litter, a lot of birds were attracted to come and eat little bits. That is where I snapped a lot of my best bird photos from the trip, including the inspiration for this painting, which you can see below. You may be wondering why I feel compelled to paint a bird like the pigeon. I often think of city birds as little volunteers as they are tend to clean up a wide range of the crap people dump. I don’t quite understand why people complain about them, I don’t care if they poop, people throw all their garbage all over the place, how is that better? Also, people dump all their poo and other worse disgusting stuff into nature’s environment; so if little pockets of nature manage to thrive in the city due to more human waste, then good for them!

The other thing that irritates me about pigeon judgement is that they really are gorgeous. Pigeons happen to have amazing colors. So do gulls. And let me tell you, if these birds were endangered, people would travel from the far reaches of the world just to see one! Why is it then, that their common-ness prohibits people from seeing their cool-ness? They come in all difference colors, and many have beautiful iridescent blues and greens in their feathers. Did you even know that about pigeons?

Just remember, you are a human, therefore if you judge a creature based on common-ness and quantity of pooping all over someone else’s environment: you are worse.

With that out of the way, maybe you can look at my painting and photo with some empathy and if you didn’t already, start to see the beauty of a common pigeon.

Before my final work on the pigeon, it looked like the below. My first drawing was a bit off for the shape of the pigeon, below it looks a little more anorexic than the real thing. Other than that, the below looked okay in general, the other primary work was done on the background, which before I finished looked a bit more shallow. Also, I did a bit of important work on the feet. Birds feet can be really tough…

Pigeon Painting at 75% Done Stage

Although I have a number of pigeon photos to choose from, I selected the below photo for it’s luminosity and full frontal pose. I do not always work from photos, but when I do my goal is not to paint photo realism and I use photos as inspiration only. Sometimes the final end up being close to the photo, and sometimes not. This one is somewhat close, but I wanted the little guy to be looking at the viewer as seen in the final.

pigeon photo that inspired the painting

Additionally, I want to note something about painting any subject with shine or iridescence. For some reason, some people seem to want to use shiny paints to try and accomplish these looks. Unfortunately, you can now buy gold, silver and all other kinds of shiny paints: but they don’t work. I have watched other people try this, only to end up with very flat looking colors. You can’t rely on any paint to create depth for you. And shine comes from depth and curve plus light source. Remember, whatever image you are referencing is flat or maybe it is real life, but it would look the same in a good enough photo and photos *never* contain sparkly flakes, and you don’t need them either. It is in fact a great range of flat colors. Your job is to analyze that carefully and try to replicate those color variations. I have seen some artists paint insanely accurate color glass studies, and trust me, they are just using the traditional, non-gimmicky colors. I personally am not awesome at achieving this…yet. But, I know theoretically how to get there, and it takes time and practice, plus a good eye and never attempting to cut corners.