A watercolor cardinal bird is a fantastic way to paint loosely and expressively. In fact any bird watercolor lends itself to this technique and is great fun to boot. In this post I will take you through painting this easy watercolor cardinal and I hope you’ll be able to follow the process. If you’re looking for cardinal painting ideas this is a great technique to try.
Loose Watercolor Cardinal Bird Painting
Draw only the necessary parts
Working on 140lb cold press Fabriano Artistico paper (here is my full materials list) I first drew out just the essentials. Some detail in the head and light marks where the wings and breast feathers would be. The feet and perch were just outlined and I was careful not to draw in every claw and wrinkle. In particular in this cardinal watercolor painting I left the belly and the back drawn in very lightly. These are areas that won’t need much definition and we’ll likely leave these loosely defined.
Go nuts and paint through the edges.
Bird art gives us watercolor painters a great opportunity to exploit the sploshiness of watercolor. Whether you’re just painting a study or for fun, or trying to produce an original watercolor painting as a gift it’s a great technique. For the first washes I kept the paint fairly light and made sure I didn’t leave any hard edges. This meant putting down some dabs of paint and then using a clean damp brush I softened those edges and really pulled that paint through the outline of the bird.
We’re painting a red cardinal and I just adore this color. I mixed my two reds together to get this – some vermillion and some permanent rose. If you don’t have vermillion then another orangey red like cad red light or naphthol red will do. Similarly another pinkish red like quinacridone red can be substituted for permanent rose.
Fight the instinct to keep within the lines
It’s really hard once you have a drawing down to paint through those lines. Try and fight that! Pull that paint out into the background. You should be using fairly light value paint and softening all the edges with water so it will dry back far lighter. In later stages we’ll go back in and define some of those lines but for now you have a lot of leeway. In the end our cardinal watercolor will benefit from this layer as it softens the effect of the edges we will put in next.
