Magpie Nest

I'm pretty excited to post this artwork. I feel it's one of my best animal paintings so far, and it had quite a journey to get here. The idea comes from some stories I read or heard as a child based around magpies stealing shiny objects. They were this whimsical, where the birds in the story stole epic treasures and had huge collections in their nests. This idea always stuck with me.

🐦High-res image for you, DL it to view it better.
🐦Orignal art & prints on my site. It's already up on Etsy. 

When AI was really spicy on socials, I was playing with Stable Diffusion and I thought maybe I can get it to generate some compositions for me. This is the best one I got. I really like this concept and I think I will paint it too, but the more hours I spent trying to get something I wanted - the more I realized I can just...do a better job myself.

This is an Australian magpie as well. The one I painted is a North American one, which has the blue coat - similarly to a bluejay.

When I started playing with print-making, I finally drew something I can use. It turned out too detailed for a tiny print, yet a really good composition. I wanted something that felt the same as the crow study I did long ago and the cardinal cascade. The composition sweeps down, and the nest and stolen items make a circular motion with your eye. The way the colorful items are laid makes your eye zigzag throughout. The space in the top right corner makes the image breathe from the sheer amount of information in the objects and branches; if I fill that space in, I am convinced the image will not work.

Next, I put the image to paper. It was suggested to me I try use watercolor pencil in blue & red to sketch, like manga artists use red & blue, so that I'm not dirtying up my artwork with graphite. Great idea, but turns out the lines bled red & blue everywhere...which turned out to be a really interesting texture. I think I will do this in the future with different colors so it adds to the final painting more.

Video of WIP images together 

After I painted the BG details, I removed the masking from the bird & painted it to get an idea of how it will look in the end. Then, I painted the individual items one by one. Last, I painted the acrylic-gouache lineart.

The magpie is mostly from imagination from random search images...because I forgot to save my reference. The stuff is vaguely referenced and unrealistic; I don't know if the bird is to scale to the spoon or the clock. I don't think it matters because of the whimsical nature.

My artistic goal with this one was to maximize everything and not break the whole image. I think I accomplished that. My working long-term goal is try find some better balance between abstraction & detail, lineart & loose painting, realism & imagination. I really wanna do another of a tree full of keys and birds, like the AI image.