Duck Stamp

For this project I chose to paint the Masked Duck. I chose to draw this duck because I was really interested in the fact that they have a blue beak.

In this project I used pencil for the rough sketch and then erased it almost completely. I then used watercolor for the coloring and shadowing, but I first put down the base color and then went over with darker shades of each color for the shading and detail.

I tried not to experiment with this project too much but I did experiment with the water. Especially since I was struggling with trying to add the reflection of the duck in the water, because the water is suppose to be really dark and muddy looking, since the Masked Duck live mostly in swampy areas. But I struggled with it too much so I just added dark shadowing underneath the duck, so it would look like its shadow was being reflected in the water instead. At first I was going to have the Masked Duck in the positions of his wings spread upwards to make it look like he was about to fly off... but then decided against it. I think if I looked up references of ducks in the water and studied how there reflection reflected in the water I could've done a lot better job instead of just putting a dark spot underneath the duck. So I think if I were to do this again I would definitely try a lot harder to do the reflection and make it look nicer.