Costa Rican Great Green Macaw watercolor

 Costa Rico is a beautiful country, with tropical coasts, misty forests, volcanos and spectacular wildlife.  In 2024 I want on an Audubon birding trip to Costa Rico and was saw an amazing variety of birds.  One particular photo from that trip stood out  as one that needed to be painted.  A Great Green Macaw (Ara ambiguus), that was pertched in the opening of a very large tree.  

Two years later, I finally painted the Macaw.  To the left is the rough draft I used to work out the overall design of the painting and color pallate:

I used Yellow, Red, Blue, Black to make the various shades of grey-green, grey-yellow bark, dark interior of the hole, and the vivid colors of the Macaw.  

Below is the finished painting.  It is almost twice as large, and tightly cropped to emphasize the bird in the hollow.  

 

Winter watercolors

After the recent workshops on perspective and snow, I began work on a painting of a house in the snow.  The reference photo is an extreme angle, but I really like it.  The roof and door of the house are dark green.  The leaves on the trees are also dark green.  The sides of the house are tan-yellow, and the wood of the picket fence is a weathered gray-brown.  However the dominant color is the white of the snow storm.

In my test painting I started by masking everything that was a shade of white, and added some random aplatter for the falling snow.  When the masking was dry, I painted the pale purple-blue sky, the green roof of the house and leaves, the tan-yellow of the house.  When the paint had dried, I removed the masking, and painted in shadows and did some touchup work. 

I used a pallet similar to the one I used for the Georgia Watercolor Society Aug 2025 workshop with Iain Stewart:  

• Undersea green
• Phalo blue turquoise
• Colbalt turquoise
• Verditer blue
• Lavender
• Cadmium Scarlet
• Naples yellow
• Burnt Siena
• Panes Gray

Working with perspective

In a recent workshop with Leigh Ellis we reviewed the artist rules of perspective that is used to make objects look three dimensional on a two dimensional piece of paper.  It also conveys scale and realism to a painting. 

This is done using: converging lines, vanishing points, color intensity and shifting, edge definition, shadows and highlights.  

For example, the converging lines in this sketch meet at the vanishing point on the right edge of the paper.  They were used to define the height of three people walking toward the vanishing point.  

   

The same converging lines and vanishing point were used for the watercolor, below along with the other tools mentioned above.  

• The light from above is brighter around the closest person, making both the highlights and shadows around them stronger. 
• The closest red umbrella is brighter, while the others are paler and shift to a red-blue.
• The edges of the closest person where light and dark meet are distinct, but they are less distinct on the further people.

In some cases additional vanishing points are needed to define your view.  For instance a house on a corner would need two vanishing points.  Shadows from the sun or clouds overhead would need additional vanishing points.