In Spring, I often walk past a marsh area down by the river, where Reed Buntings and Sedge Warblers use the Greater Reedmace as song posts.
An hour or two after dawn is best as the sun lights the reedmace, willows and birds from behind. Male Reed Buntings may be fairly weak singers but, in Spring, they look stunning, and they pose like this one, singing for long periods.
This simple ‘blob on a stick' composition appealed to me. It is a kind of telephoto view, as I see it through a telescope with the background vegetation simplified to a backdrop curtain of green.
The whole thing was quickly bashed in with a monochrome underpainting using Burnt Sienna and Cobalt Blue and I developed some areas of the bird and its perch in the first session, softening some edges in shadow with my finger. Suggestions of a few reed stems were painted with simple downward brushstrokes.
I let it dry for, oh, about a year! Then took it up again the following spring to recommence work on it. My first attempts at developing the bird weren't successful so I wiped off the paint and started again- one of the advantages of using oils.
Because most of the bird is in shadow, I resisted painting it in detail, but tried to use the effect of sunlight to define the bird. I wanted to sit the bird comfortably into its perch of the woolly, expanded seed head, softening some edges and emphasising others.