Brusho Toucan by Rebecca Yoxall

Hello, Thanks for stopping by today. I'd like to show you how I painted a vibrant Toucan using Brusho and Aztec metallic and lustre paints

Toucans are such wonderfully exotic and exciting birds. With all that colour and character they make such a fantastic subject for painting with Brusho. Firstly I drew out an outline using an HB pencil on watercolour paper making sure I had all the proportions as accurate as possible. Using wax sticks you may want to draw on some areas for highlights.

I then grabbed 3 Brusho colours and began to paint.

Yellow

Ost Red

Ost Blue

Mix up each of the colours onto a palette plus a mix of the Yellow and Ost Blue to make a green and a mix of the Yellow and Ost Red to make an orange.

 I recommend using a different brush for each colour to stop cross contamination and help keep the colours as bright and fresh as possible.

Drop each colour in for the birds beak/bill and blend with water. The chest feathers were painted with yellow and whilst the wash was still wet I placed a small amount of the green mixture around the eye so that it would spread and diffuse into the yellow. Leave the eye for now to allow plenty of time for the yellow to dry.

I waited for those sections to dry and picked up a Black and mixed a small amount in my palette

Black

I used the Black to paint in the rest of the birds body by working slowly and gradually, blending with water and also sprinkling the Black into the wet areas to make the most of all those fantastic pigments within the colour.

The eye was painted using the black and a little bit of opaque white such as white gouache or acrylic to help bring out those sharp highlights.

The feet were painted using the ost blue and black, capturing form by having the washes lighter on the top of the foot and darker underneath.

I decided to keep the background light and splashy so that it didn't over power the bright colours of the Toucan using Moss Green and Emerald green and lots of water. The branch became a few simple brushstrokes using the Dark Brown Brusho. 

Final embellishments with the Aztec lustre and metallic paint gave an iridescence to the feathers around the eye and parts on the beak/bill.

I had so much fun creating this, you really could go crazy with the colours and do lots more exciting things with the background, maybe painting in some big tropical leaves or create a whole Rainforest. 

Thanks for stopping by. Let me know what you think in the comments and if you have a go it would be great to see what you get up to.

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