Blue-Jays

I'm pretty sure this piece was for a competition, although I don't remember what competition it was. I promised Mrs. Thompson that I would do a piece in acrylic, so here we are. Acrylic on matte board. I had fun with the birds, since all I had to do was vary between white and a dark blue to get the values that I wanted, and the strokes worked well as texture of feathers. I used red, blue, and yellow, and I couldn't get the tan that I wanted but I really liked this mauve color with the color of the birds, so I just decided to use it. I was going to do a natural background, but I made the mistake of doing the foreground first, so I couldn't get the detail in how I wanted to and just painted it black, then I added some design so that it wasn't too boring. The white outline is to make sure the foreground is fully distinguishable from the black background.

Progress: