Learning to simplify

To be able to draw any complicated texture such as fur and feathers of birds or animals, you must be able to simplify the subject to some extent, which is less easy than it sounds. I asked a few painters how they went about the process, and got a bewildering set of replies. “I just look”, said one, “and I look again”. Not finding this helpful, I asked another artist how one specialized in wildlife painting.

“You learnt it over a lifetime’s experience,” he said, and then he added somewhat conspiratorially, “I have my method”. This shows more than anything else that there is no particular recipe - artists don’t always know exactly how they do things.

However, over the years I have found some of the following methods helpful. First consider the concept of the painting - what it is that you want to paint and why. This may seem rather obvious, but it is sometimes easy to forget once you get involved in the painting.

Here wet-in-wet washes are combined with dry-brush work to convey a convincing impression of the goat’s head

If you want to paint a portrait of your cat or dog, for example it would be distracting to get too involved in some detail in the background. Keep the focus on the way the light is reflected from the fur or the special markings and make sure all the other parts of the composition are supporting this central idea.

Even when you know what you want to paint and have got a reasonably clear focus, live subjects present you with so much visual information that you have to leave some of it out.

The problem is, of course, what to leave out. Try looking at the animal or bird and study and remember as much as you can. Then quickly put down as much information as you can remember.

Media and methods

To paint a perfectly good portrait or still life, special emphasis on texture is a paramount importance. A drawing or painting of a bird or animal without any indication of the characteristics of its fur, wool or feathers would be largely meaningless. Media and methods provide some ideas on how to tackle the purely technical aspects of the subject, but unfortunately technique is not the only problem the artist has to cope with.

Watercolour is an ideal sketching medium because it is so responsive and can be used with such rapidity, but it is also ideal for more detailed studies. Most of the great bird and animal artists of the 19th Century used watercolour to record every detail of their subjects with extraordinary precision. A technique used by many artists to convey the effect of fur and feathers is dry brush.

This is a method of painting with the minimum of paint on the brush so that the colour only partially covers the paper, resulting in a rather broken rasping texture. You need to practise to get the consistency of the paint right.

Dry brush is extremely effective when used in conjunction with thin washes of watercolour. The dry application of the paint is wonderful for capturing the soft and powdery lighting effects of some furs.

A related method is dry brush, which can be very useful as a final layer. In this method, similar to that described under watercolour, small amounts of thick colour are applied to existing dry layers of paint in a light skimming action to produce rather broken texture in which the underlying layers of paint strike through. It is particularly useful for modifying areas of the painting and for establishing the drier and more diffuse highlights that you might find with thicker fur or massed feathers.

It takes some practice to be able to make sketches that contain enough information to use as a basis for painting, so for a beginner it is good idea to start off by drawing some creature that will remain still for long periods of time. Horses in a field, or goats, deer in a park, cows in grassland, all make good subjects, and offer a wide range of different textures.

This is a fine example of how effectively wet-in-wet watercolour technique can be used to suggest the soft textures of feathers. The effect is enhanced by the contrasting sharp lines of grass, achieved by scaping back into the wet washes

Observation is as important as sketching, and here binoculars are a valuable aid, as you can focus in more closely on the subject. For those who are interested to draw more exotic animals such as bears, leopards, lion, the zoo is the obvious place to visit. This is also the best possible place for sketching birds such as parrots and birds of prey.

Your subjects will of course, move, but at least, being caged, they will not disappear. Although these rough sketches are essential practice and can help give a lifelike feeling to the drawing or painting, you will almost certainly need more detailed information as well, and here the photograph comes into its own.

Photographs

A wildlife artist see them as a supplement to their other studies, and indispensable when it comes to drawing and painting the smaller or rarer animals and birds. However, photographs do have to be used with caution.

Although a good photograph will present a very realistic and detailed image of the subject it doesn’t simplify the problems, because it provides you with too much information giving you the job of deciding what to concentrate on and what to leave out.

Without some other source such as a sketch it can be difficult to make such decisions. It is always best to keep a little distance between the photograph and the painting so that it is used as a reference and does not become the subject of the painting. After all, it is only an image of a bird or animal, not the real life creature.

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