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Day 20 of the 50 Day painting challenge - Hey There Little Red Rooster - by George De Chiara

Hey There Little Red Rooster

The other day on Facebook, some of my fans made suggestions of some things to paint during this challenge. I loved the suggestions and feedback from them. While I have a pretty good list of subjects already, I really like a lot of the suggestions and plan to use what I can.  One of my fans mentioned they would love to see a painting of a Rhode Island Red Rooster. It just so happens that I have some pretty good photo reference from our grandmother's chicken coop of her rooster. I didn't know it at the time, but her's is a Rhode Island Red. Since I was thinking about doing this for the challenge anyway, things couldn't have worked out better. If you'd like to join my Facebook fan page you can do so by clicking here. FYI: I haven't really announced this yet, but when I reach 200 Facebook fans I'm planning on doing a drawing for a free 6x6 inch painting. 

Here's how today's painting came to life:

 

Here's the photo I'm working from. This rooster is the friendlier of the two she has and seems to almost pose for pictures, like this one. The other rooster, who's a different breed, seems happier running around the coop chasing all the hens.

 

This is my block in today. I used a bit more paint then I normally do in this stage because I really wanted to get some of the colors to blend on the canvas.  I find this makes painting the feathers a little easier since the mixing can often look like feathers overlapping. I just need to look for them and make sure they make sense with my photo reference. Even though I'm using more paint than normal, it's still very thin so I can wipe it off if needed and I can let this dry for just a few minutes and work back into it without any fear of it lifting.

 You know it's kind of weird, but I finally realized today that I actually prefer to paint wet into wet to start (my block in) and the wet into dry for my rough color pass and finally wet into wet to finish. Until I started writing these step-by-step blogs, I would have said I paint wet into wet all the time.  Like I said, just a weird little thought that popped into my head today. Now let's get on with the demo...

 

I started with the head today. I wanted to make sure I got it placed correctly on the canvas right off the bat since rest of my drawing will be based off of this. The other reason I started with the head is I usually find them the most challenging thing to paint so I like to try to get that under control early in the painting. This way if I need to scrape off parts of it or all of it, I'm not going to mess up the other areas around it too much since I haven't done much with them yet. In this painting, that turned out to be a good thing since I scraped the beak and top of his head off about half way through painting the head. Once I thought I had the head under control, I started working out from there.

 

At this point, I'm working across the upper half-ish portion of the canvas. I'm not going to paint everything that's in the background, since that would make the painting a little too busy and take away from the rooster. I will use some of the color cues from the photograph, but I'm going to try to keep it pretty simple.

 

I'm pretty happy with the background now, and I've just about finished up the rooster at this stage. I need to add in his legs and feet still and paint the foreground. Most of this went pretty quickly so I didn't take any other progress images. Once I have everything painted to some point of completion, I went back over the whole painting and made my final adjustments and tweaks.

 

The final image.

 

Hey There Little Red Rooster

Painting Details:
Larger Version available here
Size: 6x6 inches on canvas panel. 
Medium: Original Oil Painting
Frame: none
Availability: Click here to bid.

Signed on front. Signed and dated on back.

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Topics: 50 paintings in 50 days challenge | chicken | Daily Painting | landscape | oil painting | Step by Step