Heron

Here's a demo done at class from a photo I took a couple years ago in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. A loose pencil drawing is made, then colors laid in surrounding the edges of the fallen tree and bird. As long as those edges remain dry, you can float all sorts of paint into the wet and nearly wet mixture and you'll always have the recognizable tree and bird shapes to help make the painting readable.

Once that large background mixture is dry, you can float the colors of the bird and tree over it. When coloring light cut out areas, always make sure you put the colors in *past* the edges! If you stop at the edge, you'll have another pronounced edge and things won't be looking natural. It'll start looking super hard edged and you don't want that.

You can see a little bit of opaque brown put in the left of the bird, similar to what I did with the one grape in the previous post two weeks ago.