A Happy Easter to You

I wish you all a wonderful Easter. I hope the weather is finally Spring-like.

A new project is in the making. I am doing a painting of geese for a friend for her birthday.  Pat's birthday is April 5, so I HOPE all goes smoothly, or she will end up with an IOU for a gift!

Didn't want to, but I had to use masking. Here all the initial washes are down.  All the washes were graded  and/or irregular in application. First was aureolin, then quin. red, quin. burnt orange, and two separate washes of cobalt blue.

I've done a w/w application on the goslings - aureolin, then dropping in two different brown mixtures to get a soft, downy effect. I will probably have to go in again, and darken some areas, lighten others, and soften the outlines. Now for the geese.

As always, your comments are most welcome

Struttin' to the Home Stretch - Swedish Flower Hen

I have masked the perimeter of the hen, and done three graded washes - two of aureolin and one of pink. 

I have done a graded wash of quin. burnt orange which wubbled a bit on the lower left because I didn't get to it quickly enough with the hair dryer. 

I've done another graded wash of the orange, let it dry, then covered the hen and done a splatter with a brown mixture.

I am now in the final FUSS stage. The shapes of the masked out areas are not great, but that's the nature of masking fluid. In the past, I have even tried using a sewing needle, but that doesn't work for me - too easy to scratch the paper.
To finish, I'll continue directly adding thin washes of a dark brown mix to add depth and shadows. And then I'll set her off to strut!

As always, your comments are most welcome.