Ravens’ roost

  

Busy times creating Chris’ Gilded Ravens piece, but with very satisfying results. I felt more like a cobbler than an artist today, spending several hours sitting at a table fixing hanging clips onto the back of my birds (no handy helpers available today to make many hands make light work) and getting them ready to take to his home to install. Once I had finished with this task I painted  the outline of his wall on the studio floor so I could try to get the arrangement of the birds roughed out, as you can see in the second picture. The main panel (first photo) goes in the bottom left corner of the spread of birds. I like the slightly blurry quality of the tree, achieved by using a large dry soft badger hair blending brush moving left and right only. The birds rising from the tree start out more blurry so that they are more distant, then become harder edged so that they will join with the individuals that hang alone.