Painting #221 - Sept 2 - busy again today

I think there is no rest for the wicked, and I must have been bad, since I don't seem to get any rest, seemed like I might have gotten more done, but I had to run to town to pick up a piece of glass. I have to switch a piece of glass, in a painting I've sold, to a non glare glass, the place it will hang has lots of windows and it glared so badly that they couldn't see the painting, if the painting weren't so large, I probably should have invested in museum glass, but that is more than I can afford, I will tell her that a piece of museum glass would probably be better, but for the price I sold it, she can invest in the museum glass, if she wants to. I really was busy framing and matting today, I do need to do a lot more, but I have not had the time or energy to do it lately, I am right up there with about another 30 to 40 pictures to put in mats, and while I was over there matting, I discovered some oil paintings that need to be finished, I sure do feel like oil painting now, I was over there moving things around and the oil paint just seems to call me, maybe I'll have to do some soon.

Well, today's painting is a small one, ran out of time again, so got a late start (again), I sorted my photo's the other day, and found these photo's of the black swan's that we had at the waterworks park in Coldwater, a few years ago, unfortunately, they are no longer there, some bad kids killed (stoned), the female, and then the male dissapeared, not sure if he just died of a broken heart or if he went someplace else, you know they mate for life and it's very likely that he died, so sad. Fortunately, I got a couple of photo's before that happened. I believe this is the male, you see the white feather sticking out, well, on the underside of the wings, they have white feathers, I've got a photo of him with his wings spread out, but it's not a very good photo so I used this one. I've tried to keep it simple so I used the small 4" x 4" Aquabord, the opaque watercolors were used again and I started with the swan with a light gray, this bird is really all black but I had to use the gray and white to indicate the highlights. Once the bird shape was in, I put the water in, then fine tuned the bird, the bill of this swan is red and on the end it's white, I like this little painting, and I hope you do too.