Everyone loves a chickadee, so here are six of them to paint! Perched in a row on a branch of autumnal colored oak and acorns, they are a cute family group just thinking about settling down for the night.
Materials used in Painting Chickadees and Oak Leaves in Watercolor
I used a sheet of Fabriano Artistico for the painting, and a Kuretake waterbrush to do the actual painting. The colors I used were Burnt Sienna, Quinacridone Gold, Sepia and Olive Green for the leaves and twigs, and Potters Pink, Naples Yellow, Neutral Tint and Opaque White for the birds. I suggest Daniel Smith watercolors if you are looking for artists quality, or Grumbacher Academy if you are looking for student quality. This is a really nice set of Daniel Smith colors. They are endorsed by Jean Haines. The colors are different from what I used, but would achieve the same or similar results. Alternatively you can buy the tubes individually if you want the same colors I used. But take a look at the set first.
Once you have your materials for Painting Chickadees and Oak Leaves in Watercolor, if you want to find out more about how to paint this family of chickadees, just watch the video below on YouTube. Click on the image to go straight there. In a real-time video I show you exactly how I painted these birds, and share many of my tips and advice learnt over a lifetime of painting. You can join the channel membership by taking out a small subscription to the channel, or simply subscribe and turn notifications on to receive a heads-up whenever a new video is released, which is 4 times a week.
We also have free downloads of all the paintings we have videos of on the page for downloads here on our website. Plus of course you can buy high quality prints of many of my works. As well, we are developing a range of mugs with Printful which you can order here.
Love these little chickadees. I did the single chickadee yesterday with the wash plus salt . Very cool affect. Love learning new things. But I have questions, if you have time to answer – you taped down the 6 chickadees in oak leaves. What type of tape is that? It resembles parcel packing tape used here in U.S. Does it “release” well. I use masking tape but have to slant it when carefully removing it so it doesn’t ‘skin’ my paper.
And I have updates re: paint storage. Amazon US doesn’t currently have paint trays or inserts.
DickBlick.com does not currently have paint storage trays. Search engines can promote interest and in 2 weeks, I’ll check again. Sigh. Thank you for making these videos. I am still learning but I like your presentation, knowledge base, sense of humor and will continue to watch your channel with interest.
Hi Linda, thanks very much for your message. So glad you enjoyed the chickadee! Now to answer your questions: the six chickadees were done on stretched paper. There is a video on that if you scroll back through the archives! It is indeed parcel packing tape, or something very similar, which is brown paper with a adhesive backing that needs to be wetted. In the video I explain how you stretch paper in order to achieve a surface which is smooth and doesn’t buckle when you add a lot of water. For many paintings it doesn’t matter but sometimes I use a lot of water and in that case it is much better to have stretched paper. If you want to use self adhesive tape, like masking tape, to tape down your work, I would suggest you buy some Washie tape because that doesn’t stick as tightly as masking tape. Sorry to hear that you can’t get the paint trays or inserts on line. I don’t know whether you could get them shipped from England? Probably would be prohibitively expensive. We have a lot of trouble with things being on available to us over here in France. I’m glad you enjoy the videos, and do please keep watching! Lots of good stuff coming up as we go up towards the holiday season! Thanks so much for getting in touch, and I look forward to chatting!