My current painting setup, is the same as I use while out camping. The only difference is I’m using a dining room chair and not my camping chair with sleeping bags and jacket to raise the hight of the chair.

I have made a few changes to this set-up as follows.

The changes are my paints are under my pallet on the right. My brushes are now to my left for easy access.
The iPad is centred above my art work and my water is still in the same place, to my right. The only difference here is I don’t fill the water up so high, because I’ve knocked the table a few times and water has splashed out.

The pallet with all my gouache is still to the right so I can dip my paint brush in the water and then mix correct colours without reaching over my artwork.

Another difference when I’m out camping is I use a clipboard to stop my artwork flying away in the wind and I also have a sheet of greaseproof paper at hand incase it starts to rain unexpectedly.

I paint on a black sheet of card that way I know the surface is clean as this is also my camping and cooking table. The brown paper is to keep my dirty hands off the white watercolour paper while painting.

I also have a kneadable rubber and a strip of white paper I test my brush strokes on if I’m trying to get fine detail in the grass or twigs.

I’ve never painted stacks of twigs before so I wasn’t sure how this was going to turn out. As they say you just have to experiment with things if you want to move forward. I try to challenge myself a little in each painting, this one was the birds nest and all the blue objects.

I then started to place a layer of dirt rather than all the leaves in the photo. I knew that I would get carried away if I had to paint lots of leaves and the painting would never get finished.

I then started to work on the twigs, which required lots of layering to make them look like they were all interwoven. I started to add a few leaves and some string complete with shadows on the ground.

Then I started working on the bird, which was rather difficult to get the nice glossy blue highlights in his feathers.

Finally the feet, then I re worked the dirt and added some extra objects on the ground. I also added more twigs of different colours and a few lighter ones to add some depth to the painting.

Oh I also added a mushroom as a tribute to my friend Mike in Philadelphia, who is really into mushrooms and has just told me, my artwork arrived and he’s proudly hung it on his dining room wall.

So I’m slowly getting my artwork out across the world as another one currently hangs in Germany.

I like this painting as its more of a scene than just an illustration of a bird. It was also fun compositing two photos together to make the final image and place the bower birds head in a frame of twigs.