“Bird’s Eye”

Photoshop CS5 with Mixer Brushes. Original painting made at 4K.

I wanted to force myself to try and represent something in a painting with a limited amount of solid shades (each on a seperate layer, actually). I got it down to about 15 shade layers; a couple layers for the yellows of the beaks and claws, a couple of layers of white for the highlights and the rest are shades of black. All the layers are set to various levels of opacity to; either screen (for the yellows and white) or multiply for the blacks. What this did was “tint” the original background, which is a scan of a grocery store paper bag.

This is either a Brown Hawk or Eagle, I’m not truly sure what it should be considered as I found out later the only major difference between the two bird types are that eagles are larger than hawks. Imo, I say hawk.