Ozark Birds of Prey : Red-shouldered Hawk

Mad Rox

5 years ago

Just finished this red-shouldered hawk (Buteo lineatus).

The original is SOLD. Prints are available.

Progression Pics: Art in Progress

I post all of the steps as I’m doing it at Instagram, so if you want to follow along in real time, follow me there or on FB. Sometimes it’s a good bit later when I get around to updating the website.

Getting Started on the Red-Shouldered Hawk

I decided for this set (I’m doing two of this species) to use the gray-green silt stone for a background. So I went ahead and did both backgrounds at the same time. Here’s the first one with the rough sketch in place.

Background and roughed-in sketch in place.

Issues with angles

There’s always something to correct once the sketch-in begins to take shape. This time it’s the tilt of his head. The angle is wrong and it throws everything else off. The eyes are the first thing I like to do, but I can’t do the eyes until the head is shaped properly.

The head is wrong… wrong angles, wrong tilt.

I ‘erased’ the lower half of his head by lifting the black paint.

Now the tilt is right, and I put the eyes and beak. I will work more on this later, but this is enough for now to allow me to move on.

Colors for the Red-Shouldered Hawk

The colors I’ll be using for this hawk are similar to the colors I used on the kestrels and the goshawks. For the goshawks, I used a lot more black, though.

I made paints specifically to get ready to do this set of hawks, though, and each set of paints vary depending on the rocks I used to make it.

Russet sandstone (Nirvana)
Red sandstone (Intoxicating)
Yellow Sandstone
Char-shale (a combination of creek shale and charred wood)
tumbled limestone (Ancient white)
Brown brown (from a really hard black sandstone)

Blocking in Color

First I added the russet on his chest and wings.

Then I added contour lines to his head.

Added more shadow to his head, added more pigment to the background. It’s going to be a few days before I get a chance to work on it again now.

I had hoped to get both of the red-shouldered hawks done this month, but it seems that life had other plans. February always feels like such a short month, even though it’s only a few days shorter than most. I am going to have to start reducing the amount of other things I commit to if I want to have time to work more on paintings.

Update 3/11/19: Finally I’ve had time to get back to work on the red-shouldered hawk.

Update 3/19/19: Took me a while, but I’m back to work on the painting. By the end of the day, I ended up one step forward and two steps back. The tail is blocked in better, and so are the feet. But then when I started working on the wings I realized the bars are just too wide on them. So I erased most of them and will start over on that part tomorrow.

These are just the place-holders for the feet. I still have a LOT more work to do on them. But they’re in the right place, in the right proportions, and at the right angles. That’s all that matters at this point.

Progress on Red-Shouldered Hawk by the end of the day. Most of the bars on the wings are erased (lifted with a clean wet brush). I’ll put them back narrower so it is more accurate.

Still working on it… and sometimes I do work on it upside down, lol. But this pic is upside down because I can’t get it to orient right-side-up, even after editing and saving. I’m tired. It’s late. And I’m just going to leave it like this, lol.

Not long after I finished this, within a few minutes, a huge crack of thunder rattled the land. The storm had been building all day with my sense of excitement to be nearly finished with this piece. My relief at finishing serendipitously coincided with the start of the storm. It seemed like a good omen.