Uncaged Birds

8x11 watercolor on Italia 140 lb soft press paper.  It's the first one painted yesterday since taking Jan Fabian Wallake's Houston workshop last week. She recommended we take a photo and deconstruct it into geometric shapes totally unrecognizable using design principles then paint it. I took parakeets in a gilded cage, drew them and an archway on newsprint, disregarded the cage bars, and did lots of thumbnail sketches. Then with scissors I cut out another bird and arranged and rearranged on tracing paper until a composition emerged. The archways are now doors, the birds (black and white for contrast) are uncaged and free, with some pattern surrounding them.  Cool accents are in a warm color dominance; note the other bird at top by a slice of orange, rather bland and almost unnoticeable.  I'm thinking of painting this again in a larger format.

Below is a shot of the tiny photo.