How to create a blue jay painting

Prepare your palette with blue, yellow, green, and white. You don't need too much. You can always get more if you run out.

Dip the brush in various colors and overlap and blend the colors so that you end up with different shades and tints of blue/green with occasional highlights of yellow/green.

This is what your palette should look like as you work...

Play with it until you like the way it looks...but the idea is that it is an out of focus forest, trees, bushes in the back ground.

Now we will add a bit more detail for branches that could be closer up. We are going to use purple and dull it down with just a bit of yellow (not too much) to make a purple/brown color.

If you want to create more texture, you can mix in a bit of modeling paste to your purple brown paint to make it thicker.

Make some faint broken lines in the back ground in varying intensities and then make one large branch as your primary focus.

Be creative with your use of color...don't be afraid to make the colors a bit more intense if you like. You can also add more hints of trees in the distance if you like.

Now, in white, paint a solid form that resembles a bird silhouette. Basically, it's a small circle, atop a diagonal oval, with a skinny rectangle for the tail feathers. Add a beak.

Paint blue across the crown of the birds head and on the top portion of the oval. Leave the breast area white.

With some fresh dark blue, outline the wing where it meets the breast, then make some short strokes on the lower part of the wing.

Now make some short strokes with white and let them overlap and mix with the previous short blue strokes.

Serve yourself a little black and with a small brush, begin adding some details. Pain the beak, the eye, the frame of the cheek and some accents on the wing in black.

You may want to go back in with a little white and do some mixing around the face till you like the way it looks.

Add some white accents to the wings...not too many. Then, with the black, make some horizontal hash marks here and there.

Add a few highlights to the beak with white, and you are finished!