Medium: Watercolor, Image Size: 25″h x 39″w, 1989.

I painted this Prairie Falcon perched atop a fence post along Louie Rd. in the Shasta Valley north of Mt. Shasta, California. I saw this scene in the winter with the flooded pastures dotted with clumps and mounds of grass which I thought made a very interesting composition. To do this painting in watercolor was tedious because painting the bird, fence posts, grass, and grassy clumps required using Miskit masking fluid to block them from being painted as I painted the background. The Miskit acted as a water-resistant film so the watercolor wouldn’t paint the paper. I first masked out the bird and fence posts-which were easy to do, but the grass required hours of painting hundreds of grass blades with the Miskit. I started with masking out a hundred or so grass blades, and I would then do a light wash of yellow. I would continue masking another hundred or so grass blades, and I would do a slightly darker wash. I would repeat this process and do successive washes that were slightly darker each timeuntil until all the grasses were painted. I then rubbed off all the Miskit-it is like rubber cement, so it comes off. The grasses then had a lot of variations in colors and shades as of the progression of washes and masking added up to the final image. The bird and fence posts were painted last.

This painting was juried into the international bird art exhibition called Birds in Art, 1989, Leigh Yawkey Woodsen Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Original is sold.