New Bird Painting - Hummingbird Heaven

I just finished up another oil painting of birds and flowers. This is a picture of hummingbirds among fuchsias and petunias. Although these flowers come in all sorts of colors, I tried to keep a color harmony of only pinks, pinkish reds, and pinkish purples. For these colors I used only permanent rose and mauve (and white, of course). Permanent rose is a perfect complement for the phthalo green used throughout much of the background. They mute each other nicely. You can see permanent rose and phthalo green mixed directly together in the light background without any drab grays or muddy colors being created by the mix. I like the way these colors work together here.

20"x16"

Oil on Multimedia Artboard

The birds are broad-tailed hummingbirds. They look very similar for the popular ruby-throated hummingbird and are often mistaken for the ruby-throat. Because rubies are probably the best known and most popular of the hummingbirds, I had originally planned to use ruby-throats here. The reason I ended up using broad-tailed instead is for color harmony. I really wanted to use the complementary colors of permanent rose and phthalo green. One way to distinguish a ruby-throated hummingbird from a broad-tailed hummingbird is by the color of the throat. While both are red, the broad-tailed hummingbird's throat is more of a rose colored red, while the ruby's leans more toward reddish orange. Sometimes the ruby's throat can appear very orange, even yellow-orange, when the sun hits it at certain angles. Because I wanted to keep my colors on the rosy side and not introduce orange, I chose the more rosy colored broad-tailed hummingbird. They are just as pretty as the ruby-throat so perhaps it's time they get more attention. :)

Btw, another way to distinguish a broad-tail from a ruby is by the shape of the tail. The broad-tailed hummingbird's tail is straighter along the bottom. The ruby-throated hummingbird's tail is forked, forming an inverted V. The tail shape is probably the easiest way to distinguish them. Read more about the broad-tailed hummingbird here on National Geographic.

Prints and notecards of this painting are available on my Fine Art America page: