I started a large oil painting in January 2015 in the hope of completing it for my four Cambridge Open Studios weekends in July 2015. However, I got sidetracked and have only just this week got back to it. It is oil on a stretched box canvas size 48″ by 16″, and the composition is completely made up from an idea I had in my head at the time. Thank you to Martin Johns who supplied a lovely photograph of Macaws, and I myself visited Banham Zoo and achieved some rather nice photographs of the Macaws there, both resources helped me to make up the final design. Having never been to the tropical jungles, the background is my own vision of how it might look. The birds seem to each have a different, tantalizing personality; they might all look the same at first glance, but look closer and they have very different faces. I do have two other commissions in the pipeline, but decided that this painting could wait no longer – only trouble is I have forgotten how to paint with oils! But I will persevere and the beauty of the medium is that it can be scraped off and painted over again if I muck it up. (For previous history, please search with “” and hopefully all posts will appear!)
Progress at the end of February 2015
Painting the Parrots the last few days (June 2016!)