Maine Duck Stamp

Artist Statement

For my duck stamp I chose to draw the fulvous whistling duck because I liked the pattern on its feathers and I thought it was cute. I did some research on where this type of duck lives and found that they move around a lot but are often found in marshes. I included some plants in the background to show that they are in a marsh. The only visible difference I could find between the male and female fulvous whistling duck was the feathers on the back of the females neck are black. I added that detail to the duck on the left to show that it's a female duck.

I started with a light pencil drawing without doing a lot of shading and then I did some layers of watercolor. I started with watercolor cover up all the white on the paper and make a base color before adding the colored pencil layers. I was able to add a lot more depth and darken the colors with colored pencil. For the water I did a lot of layers of green and blue colored pencil before blending it with white. There are still some lighter spots that I couldn't cover with colored pencil because of the texture of the watercolor paper.

This piece was good practice with drawing realistically and focusing a lot on matching the colors to an image. I used multiple images of ducks to get an idea of how to color the feathers correctly. I always have trouble coloring water realistically and including reflections. I think I could have made the reflections a little more visible and added more green to the water because it turned out brighter and more blue than I wanted it to. My favorite part of the process of this drawing was coloring the ducks faces with colored pencil and building up layers to show the highlights and shadows.