Continuing the Owl

First off, I want to apologize for the missed blog entry last week.  I injured my foot and have been pretty much off everything until today.  I'm not entirely sure how I hurt my foot, but it was incredibly painful for several days and I had to wrap it and take some hefty pain killers to walk.  After a lot of rest, things are looking up and my doctor has recommended I go to an orthotic clinic for an assessment.  I have had low grade lower back pain pretty much continuously since at least the beginning of the year, so there may be something connected to that.

So, after more time off than I wanted...back to the owl!  I didn't do too much more today.  I decided to start work on the eyes.  Fortunately, owl eyes are only two parts: the coloured area and the pupil/eyelid.  I mixed a light yellow-green for the coloured part and a deep violet/sepia for the pupil/eyelid.

He looks a bit like he's winking.  And looking up, unfortunately not what I was going for.  I also started on the beak.  This gave me a bit of trouble because my model makes it look like his beak is a grey-ish colour.  Oddly, grey isn't really a good colour in watercolour - yes you can mix it, but it tends to look dull.  That's actually it's purpose in most cases, to dull a colour to the background, or to enhance a colour next to it to pop it into the foreground.  Since I didn't actually want to do either of these, I thought I'd try mixing a pale purple colour with some cobalt blue and alizarin crimson.  I think the effect is working.  

I also added texture to the middle of the top of his head.  I think there must be shorter feathers here that do not exactly lay flat against the head.  There's still a LOT of work to do on the head feathers!

Then I finished the other eye and added some more pupil to even the eyes out a bit.

I also added the outer grey ridge of the eye feathers (also pale purple at the moment).  I'm not really liking the way the eyes are working out at the moment, but I'm treating this whole thing as an exercise so we'll do what we can with it and go from there.  I may be able to save the eyes, but it looks to me like there's an inherent flaw in the original drawing in that one eye is WAYYYY bigger than the other. However, I do like how other things are going so I think for now I'll continue and see where this goes.