Mixed Media Bird Quartet 2

By this time I've done quite a bit of work on these four little paintings.  First, I did all four backgrounds.  At that point, they looked like the two on the left without the white bird shapes.

For these backgrounds, I added wash after wash of Golden fluid acrylics.  My intent was to make two with warm backgrounds and two with cool backgrounds.  But there are bits of cool washes on the warm ones and bits of warm washes on the cool ones.  During this process I painted over the paper clay elements as well.

At this point, I patina'd the paper clay elements.  For the pieces with the warm backgrounds, I used VerDay iron and for the cool backgrounds I used VerDay copper.  When I sprayed them with the VerDay patina solution, parts of the iron turned rust and parts of the copper turned blue-green patina. On the warm backgrounds, I wish I had used something that was more different that the rest of the background color.  I'm thinking now that those warm painted backgrounds should have been, basically, a warm green like Sap Green.  Or, a red-violet with the copper would have been nice too.

Anyway, the next step was to gesso over the shapes of the birds so I'd have a white background to paint on.  The pieces on the right in the above photo are completed to that point.  The photo below is a closer view of the wren.