Elizabeth Butterworth: My name is Elizabeth Butterworth and I paint birds for a living.
I’m going to just try and do a picture of this feather now and make it look three dimensional as if it’s sitting on the page, make it look real.
I’m going to also try and put the textures in on the feather as I go along. First tip is put in the shadows. So off we go.
We’re just going to put down a few nice, easy shadows. Keep it light so you can keep working on it for longer. I’m using gouache because that gives you really good darks very quickly.
There would be three lots of textures because there’s the texture of the quill, which is quite hard and needs to be shown as being different from the sort of quite almost shiny texture of the feather.
And then you’ve got the fluffy bit. So you’ve got three textures there to think about as you’re doing your picture.
Quite often, whatever you’re drawing, it’s just that little bit darker on the edge and just that little bit lighter inside. You see here dark, light, darker.
Now then we’re going to have a go at some of this fluffiness. Here it comes now. Each little barb has got little bits off it and I’m trying to just get a good body of paint on it.
This is the finished feather. You can see the shadows around the sides and you can see the fluff and you can see the light applied on top of the other tones to create the form.
So as it goes, you know, up and down again. And then you’ve got the quill, which is quite harsh and sharp.
