Watch the birdie

Yesterday, on Messenger, apropos of nothing in particular, one of my new artist friends from Deb Weiers's class (so not that new, we "met" in August) sends me a message:

"What is the deal with putting birds on ladies' shoulders (and heads) in SO much artwork by SO many different people? Is it symbolic of something? Did it just become a trend because some people saw other people doing it and did likewise?"

I couldn't really tell her, so I went to Google and asked about bird symbolism in art and discovered quite a lot of information, both pagan and religious, about the meanings of various birds. I found it kind of fascinating; I was also surprised when my friend pointed out that I had at least three recent paintings with birds in them, one of which was a shoulder bird.

 

Since she asked, and since I hadn't thought of someone else I wanted to paint yesterday, and since her name IS Phoebe (like the bird), here is "Phoebe on Phoebe," with her question spelled out in case anyone else has ideas other than mine!

I feel like I ruined this; she was originally on a plain white background, and I liked the stark purity of it, but I used too soft a pencil when creating my base drawing and then dragged my hand through it so that the white was smudged all over the place, and wouldn't erase properly. I had already done my black lettering on the white background, so when I decided to put in a background color, I almost went with a light Cobalt blue watercolor, but at the last minute decided instead to use one of the Daler Rowney inks.

I was sorry I did; the inks are staining, and even with water on the paper the Marine Blue dried faster than I could move it around, leaving darker and lighter spots and looking splotchy. After it dried, I decided I would have to go over it with something else to make it look like it was streaky on purpose, so after trying two other inks on a test swatch over the Marine Blue, I ended up putting the Cobalt watercolor over the top, which I liked.

That, however, was so dark that it made the black writing almost invisible, so I put a white outline on it, which bolloxed it up completely. What I should have done was write exactly over the top of the black with the white, but instead I tried to outline/shadow it, and it turned into a big mess, barely decipherable. I finally ended up washing off the white gel pen, painting a "shield" over the indelible black writing with two coats of gesso, and re-lettering in black on that, putting a border around it to make it look more like a planned object. The things we go through to salvage an art piece! Thank you, Deb, for teaching me ways and means to do that. Anyway...my "bird on head" picture, just for Phoebe.

Pencil, Daler Rowney inks, black Uniball pen, white Signo gel pen, Paul Jackson watercolors, India ink, stencil, white gesso, on Fluid 140-lb. watercolor paper, 9x12 inches.