Northern White Crowned Shrike - Aquarelle, FOR SALE

mariekedestip (49)in #tanzania • 7 years ago

Fellow steemians, welcome!

Another blog, another painting. In 2012 I went to Tanzania with a friend, who also was a co-student (good old days, haha), we went to Haydom Lutheran Hospital for a facultative kind of internship. After this medical part of the trip, we went for several safaris in this beautiful country.

Not much people know that East Africa is familiar for its marvellous diversity in ornithologic animals. I do love birds, so for me it was a true feast.

I photographed a lot of birds, and one of them was the Northern White Crowned Shrike, (in Dutch Rüppells witkruinklauwier, and Eurocephalus ruppelli in Latin) a darkbrown bird with a little white hat. 'Kruin' means back of the head, in Dutch, so in both languages the name says it all. Males and females both look the same, though the juveniles have a brown crown, white sides of the head and a grey chest. So I still don't know if I photographed a male or a female, though this sure was an adult.

It doesn't really look like an exotic bird, with the neutral colours, but the look of the bird in this particular picture gave me a dreamy feeling. So I had to paint it of course! I started with Canson Montval 300g/m2 watercolourpaper, which I spanned by hand. I sketched with pencil and used liquid film mask to spare white for the next layer. I could paint a loose background with very wet paint, and when the background was done, I removed the film.