A Minor Tweak To My Goose

Boy that title sounded a little off color.  Now that I have your attention, I was referring to the slight change I made to the geese painting.

I know I was worried that I sucked the life out of my painting by making the geese too real, yet I just couldn't resist my innate urge to make something life like.  Call that platitude or whatever, that has been the bane of my endeavors in painting.

I decided to punch it up a bit by altering the contrast and definition of my geese feathers.  I got that idea by playing with the "clarity" attribute in Windows photo editing app.

I thought of a way of re-defining the feathers on my goose.  I used a small Chinese brush and loaded it with the tea/ink mixed color.  Onto the surface of this loaded brush, I piled on some white gouache with another brush.  Imagine a Klondike Ice Cream Bar, where the ice cream is coated with a thin layer of chocolate?  This is the effect I was looking for; except tn my case, the brown color is on the inside, and the shell is white.

With the brush so loaded, I pressed firmly using the side-tip technique on to my goose.  Thus each brown dab would be surrounded by an outline of white.  By experimenting with the placement of such dabs, I was giving my feathers more realism; creating the pretense of blades of feathers. 

At the same time I selectively applied pure white gouache to certain white areas, to accentuate the original white gradient.

Well that was fun for an afternoon.