BALD EAGLE, PART 2

With this new painting on its way, I begin to feel confident that something will come of it. Since I chose a more up-right pose, my intentions are to capture something of the character of this young eagle along with a hopefully meaningful interpretation. Most of the head feathers of young or sub-adult eagles are tipped with pale spots so in order to capture this in my painting, I had to paint around all of these tips leaving the underlying washes to somehow represent them. This seemed a very difficult task so work proceeded slowly. I could have masked off all of them using masking fluid but I really don't like doing this and seldom resort to masking in any way. Once I had laid in more of the base colors and tones, I spent quite a bit of time working on the eye again bringing it close to being finished. The bill also received some work keeping the washes light for now as I wanted to retain the effect of bright sunlight which I felt I lost a little on the previous eagle painting.