Duck Stamp

Canadian Geese

9 x 12

Gouache

This is my duck stamp where I painted two Canadian geese in water. I used gouache for this piece because it’s a great mix between acrylic paint and watercolor, and my past duck stamp paintings were painted with acrylic paint, so I wanted to try something new. In the past years, I also noticed myself painting the foreground first which made filling in the background very hard, so this time I painted the water first and the ducks after. Originally, I only had one duck in my sketch but added another smaller one to the left to fill in space. Using my reference photos, I was planning to pay attention to detail as most as I could in order to make my painting more realistic, but after painting a few feathers, I realized that this wouldn’t be as easy as I thought because of all the texturing, so I decided to instead get the general shapes of each area of the duck, and instead use blending techniques to create the feather effect. After I was satisfied with the first duck using this technique, I followed to do the same with the second one. My past duck stamps were always a swan species, so I only had to work with different hues of white, but for this painting, I was using a lot more color and I wasn’t very confident at first, but I’m really happy with how this turned out. The water effect in the background was used with many different shades of blue as well as colors of the duck to add a reflection effect to the water. Even though this project was time-consuming, I’m happy I decided to branch out with a new duck species and material because I am very satisfied with my results, and I believe I strengthened my shading techniques. One thing that I loved about using gouache was the way I could layer it, and this helped create a pattern for the feathers that I was trying to aim for.