Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Great Black-backed Gull 6"x6" oil $100

Firstly, I give this bird a 9.5 for take-off form!  There was hardly a ripple as he lifted off.  I saw him out in the water alone and couldn't tell what kind of bird it was, although it was noticeably larger than any of the gulls on the beach.  After some research, I am assuming it was a Great Black-backed Gull that was still wearing juvenile plumage.  I did this in the style of the current DPW challenge, which was to use 2 complementary colors plus white.  I chose blue and orange.  With one of the colors, you could create a full range of shades (like reddish blue to greenish blue) but with the other color, you could only mix it with the compliment and/or white.  I could have pushed the range of the blues a lot more, but I wanted a grayish background.  I used the orange and only mixed it with the blue (creating brown) or with white, to lighten it. Here's one of our vacation sea gull stories:  We were on the beach and a gull snagged a large, unopened bag of chips from some folks near us and took off in a low flight, weighted down by the chips.  A little boy popped up and started chasing the gull who couldn't get enough lift and finally dropped the bag of chips quite a way down the beach.  The little boy was thrilled to get his chips back and be the hero of the family!

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