Mini Bird Paintings

Every once in a while, I find the time and energy to paint and for the last few years all I’ve been interested in painting is birds and flowers. My paintings are always tiny because I get overwhelmed when there is too much blankness to cover. Much like with my food styling, I think my creativity thrives when I can focus on something small where I feel I can concentrate my effort into a lot of detail in a limited space. I use acrylics to paint because that is what we always used in my advanced art class in middle school and so I never really learned to work with anything else.

I recently painted this mini bird painting (above) for my friend Bob for his birthday. Bob is a very knowledgable birder who has encouraged me a lot in my own interest in birds. He also owns many birds as pets and I sometimes look after them when he is traveling. My favorite of his birds is a sweet gal named Apollo, so I did a painting of her. Apollo is a Bourke's parrot. She can be taken out of her cage when I am visiting and she just chills with me while I clean the cages, and always hops onto my finger when I ask her to. Here’s a photo of me with Apollo:

A couple of years ago I painted some eggs around Easter time and I was very proud of them. I shared them on Instagram but I think that most of my following is only interested in seeing the food I make and not my artwork. (I was kind of bummed that the post didn’t get more reach, which I know is stupid.) I realized that this blog should be a space for me to share whatever I want and if anything it’ll be a space for me to preserve all my creations that I am proud of. Here are some photos I took of those eggs with my mini bird paintings. I painted birds that I see often in my backyard—a dark-eyed junco and a house finch.

If for some reason you are a bird owner who manages to find this blog post and you would like to commission a painting of your bird, I would be delighted to hear from you.