12″ x 16″, Watercolor Pencils, Watercolor
My piece is a Kakapo bird from New Zealand. A Kakapo is also sometimes known as an owl parrot or a moss chicken. They are almost extinct but they are by far my favorite bird species. I painted this realistic painting with watercolor pencils in order to get the very fine details. The media my artwork is made from is watercolor, colored pencils. I started with really light colors that I saw in my reference picture then I slowly added darker, more vibrant colors. After I was pleased with the main part of my painting, I moved on to the background. This took me a little longer because of the detail I wanted to show in the closest branches. I again started with light colors then added the dark brown. The darker branches consist of just dark brown and more and more black as I move farther away from the center. My final touches were the border of tan around the picture to add to the background. With permission, I used a reference picture taken by a photographer in New Zealand named Andrew Digby. He is extremely passionate about these birds. He actually named the bird in the picture. The female’s name is Alice which I found is really cute. There are 247 of these birds left as of 2023. I came across these intriguing birds when I was looking for a species to do for my art project at school. I tried to show how much these birds mean to many people around the world. In addition to the choice of bird, my choice of format was inspired by historical Natural History Illustrations. The artists and scientists who inspired my art piece, created drawings and paintings, before photography was invented, of animals and plants. These drawings were made for the sole purpose of recording details about various species. Some of the animals or plants drawn have gone extinct. This is the method I chose because the Kakapo bird is nearly extinct and I want people to fall in love with them as much as I and others have.