Blue Tit in Quince Tree in Soft Pastel - Timelapse

Hi everyone, welcome to my channel and to this time-lapse version of a lovely little blue tit in some pretty blossoms. I hope you enjoy the speedy version of this. I will also be releasing this as a full real-time tutorial series to my patrons over on Patreon but if you enjoy this here as always please do hit subscribe. This piece is on pastelmat paper. It's the yellow maize colour of pastelmat and it's 12 inches by 12 inches. I composed the image using three different photo references. A blue tit has been on my bucket list for many, many years but I just haven't managed to capture good enough or detailed enough photos to be able to paint one and this spring I've been so lucky with the variety of birds around me. I moved house back in October last year and this spring has been such a welcome surprise because I've got all sorts of birds around me here and for the first time ever I've managed to get some great photos of the blue tit. Some of those I will be releasing as bonus photographs for my patrons over on Patreon because out of the 10 photos that might be paintable I probably won't have time to paint all 10 of them so I might as well release some of those extra photos to my students over on Patreon. So that will come as part of this tutorial series. Now it's often the case that I don't manage to photograph wildlife in the exact setting that I want to paint them so I'm often changing backgrounds and that was the case with this little bird as well. I was just lucky to get the bird in focus and I really wanted to create something special for this background and it's been such an incredible spring down in the south of Spain where I live. I think we had such a wet winter that the plant life and the insect life and the bird life has just gone crazy this spring. I've been enjoying all of my spring themed projects so much and so I decided to play about with the composition of this piece. Also in my surrounding area here we have a lot of fruit trees and different types of nuts growing and this I believe is a quince tree. Now correct me in the comments if I'm pronouncing that wrong because I'm never sure. Is it quince or quincey? I'm really not sure. In Spanish it's actually a bit easier for me. It's el membrillo and I think that is the tree. At the moment it's starting to form the fruit and it does in fact look like the quince fruit. So just a few weeks ago though these blossoms were so beautiful and I went around with my camera taking lots of close-ups of different parts of the trees that were in blossom with this sort of composition in mind. So I took lots of photos with lots of branches going in different directions thinking that I could perhaps pair it up with one of my bird photos. So it was just a matter of finding one part of the flowers where we get a little branch coming out at just the right angle to accommodate this little bird. And then I actually worked from about three or four different photographs because I pieced together the floral composition around the bird using lots of different parts of different photographs. So I took some of the really out of focus flowers in the distance from one shot. The three up close and detailed flowers in the foreground just below the bird, they were from a different shot. And I used Photoshop as I often do just to piece together some kind of a composition. What I really wanted to create was a little scene around the bird. One that described the depth of our perspective here. I really wanted to give the impression that we are right in amongst the blossoms with the bird and that we get a varying degree of closeness from all of the different flowers as you do get with your own eyes when you are looking at something like this in real life. I love creating that sense of depth using out of focus techniques and with soft pastel that's great to do because you can just smudge things more. It really is the perfect medium for trying to create that sense of depth. The out of focus effect happens so nicely with soft pastel because I'm just using my fingertip really to smudge and blend the colors a bit more. And then the little bird itself here right in the center should really pop out from the background because of the extra bits of detail that I add on the bird. So even if I'm creating a background that is quite busy, there are so many ways that you can make sure that the main subject really pops out. And one of those of course is with the colors, the contrast between the edges of the bird and the soft background behind. And quite honestly this has been one of the most enjoyable paintings that I have created in a long time. I've absolutely loved doing this piece partly because this is one of my absolute favorite little birds and I've been really trying to get good photos of one for such a long time. And this year it just all seems to have come together right down to the beautiful blossoms near enough to my house for me to just walk out in the morning with the dogs and go take some lovely photographs. So this has been a most enjoyable piece and hopefully I can share some of that joy with my students over on Patreon. As I said I'm going to release a lot of bonus reference images. I got a lot of different photos of the little blue tit and they have managed to nest in the side of our house. So we've been very lucky to watch them carrying building materials and now at the moment they are carrying food to their babies. So an absolute joy to witness this beautiful little creature and then to actually get to study him up close in this reasonably large painting of a blue tit because the bird has ended up bigger than life. They are so tiny in person and I do think that this is a male blue tit. Again correct me if I'm wrong in the comments but I think they tend to have like a taller crown of their head and their colors are just a little bit more vibrant than females. So yeah he has been an absolute joy to study and I'm hoping that many are going to work along with me on this one because not only is it a useful one for the bird and the lovely delicate details on the bird, it was such an interesting background to work on as well. So many different levels within the background to create that sense of depth but it just seemed to come together because sometimes these backgrounds can feel so laborious and so difficult but this one just seemed to go right. So I hope that lots of my students will have the same experience and will end up with a lovely study of such a beautiful little bird. So as always if you do end up working along with me on this one and you share it somewhere online please do tag me, I love to see. But I'll add links in the description for where you can find this full-length tutorial. If you enjoyed this here then please as always do hit subscribe. But thanks so much for watching and until next time, happy pastling!