Lindy Whitton Studio

Postcard No 40: Life by the River

One of my favourite river birds is the pied cormorant. They looks so elegant with their white chests and black bodies sitting on half submerged branches or jetty posts. Then they spread their wings to dry in the sun and look faintly ridiculous! If you’ve ever seen them swimming underwater, chasing fish, you’ll know how graceful and swift they are as their streamlined bodies flash and shimmer through the water.

There’s often not much time to capture birds so I usually grab my trusty Schminke travel watercolour tin and wash them in very quickly. This gives them a fresh quality but also results in lots of runs and unexpected marks.

This is a favourite perch of cormorants near the sedgeland boardwalk where I often go walking. Today there were two baby cormorants fishing nearby, they were really having a ball as they dived and came up triumphantly with tiny fish in their tiny beaks.

This adult was peacefully perching in the morning sunshine and a bit easier to catch as it stayed there for a bit longer than those two feeding birds.

If you’ld like to try painting birds think about using watercolour pans to quickly block in their shapes. Another good choice are pastels but I find a watercolour tin easier to pop in my pocket and have a good range of colours at my fingertips.