Peacock Painting Tutorial

I love peacock designs, showpieces, cushions covers, rangolis, mehandi and the list can go on. When I was a child, I used to have a peacock feather in my notebooks. I remember going to the market with my dad to get those feathers and we had to search a lot. I also have these in my home here in USA. There is a beautiful peacock collection for home decor in Pier 1 imports. I wish to own it one day and make a corner inside my house with my paintings of course.

I love all peacock colors; it has all shades of cool color shades. Personally, I love to paint a cool-color painting than a warm-color painting. This painting is my favorite so far and it took me the maximum time to paint this amongst all my paintings. I decided to have a gold touch to this painting. Silver would have looked good aswell, I might make my next peacock painting in a rustic silver touch. I also decided to make it symmetrical; I had not tried symmetric paintings in a while. While making wall art abstracts, I let my imagination run wild.

Here is how I made my painting:

I taped 3 16×20 inch canvas (back stapled, ready to use, primed) together. I put a masking tape to make a border of 1 inch on top and bottom. I used plaster paste and added texture with paint knives. This would give it a 3d effect. I painted it with the colors of the peacock in diagonal stripes and added gold lines to it. Then I started with the center. I drew few concentric circles on the center canvas to keep both the peacock heads symmetric and aligned. I also added the plaster paste to the green mango shape in the center and the rest was just paints, blended with different shades of green and blue. The blue borders also have a touch of gold.

I added heads to peacock and covered entire canvas with alternate blue and green. I chose fluorescent green and blue to cover the canvas as I wanted this as a background, both darks would have made it more prominent. I love the capability in acrylics where we can just keep layering paints.

I started adding feathers to the peacocks with lot of details. I also added yellow borders since I have used golden effect. This was a time consuming process as each feather was detailed.