Mix a puddle of dark brown, Paynes grey, and yellow ocher. Work a second water thinned coating over the wings. While this application is still damp add a few random brush strokes of red brown, yellow ocher, and white.
Add a second coating to the cattail leaves with random touches of yellow ocher, medium yellow mixed with white, and hookers green. Hit the highest edges of the leaves with white.
Add a second coating of Paynes grey to the head, neck, and feet. Take the brush with Paynes grey into the cattails in a few random spots.
Again, let everything dry well.
To add a few bright white tips to the edges of the wing feathers pick up a small amount of un-thinned white on your brush tip. Work the tip several times over your palette to remove any excess color. Now drag the brush over the edges of the wings. This dry brushing will color only the highest parts of the wing tips.
Using Paynes grey dry brush the feather tips of the longest flight feathers. Note in the front wing in the photo below that these feathers show both the white and the black dry brushed coloring.
Add dry brushed white to the shoulder feather tips and the back feathers. Touch the tail feathers with Paynes grey.
Trim the routed edges of the plaque using medium yellow for the inner ring and hooker green for the outer ring.
Since I have used a lot of water to thin the colors I allowed my plaque to dry for two hours before I added two light coats of polyurethane or acrylic spray sealer to the entire plaque. Now let the spray sealer set overnight.
At this point your carving should be very colorful and each area of the carving should have a wide variety of colors and color tones. This is not a coloring book – fill in the lines – painting. It has lots and lots and lots of small random spots of changing color.
