Part 10: J - (Comb-crested) Jacanas

Hello! If this is your first time here and you have no idea what the Alphabet Superset Project is or why this is part 10, the first post in the series might help. But also, here is a quick recap:

Since the first week of September, the idea was that every week or so, I would paint an Australian animal or (an animal that visits Australia) and preferably one I have my own photos of (or Scott has photos of). Every week would be a different animal in alphabetical order i.e. week 1= A, week 2= B, week 3= C etc.

While the weekly thing hasn’t really worked out for me, I will continue doing this until it is finished. The project was due to end in April 2024 but I will definitely need to take it beyond that given I am currently only up to the letter M in painting. I am doing this as part of a project/challenge called the Alphabet Superset, the brainchild of Youtuber (among other things) Campbell Walker aka Struthless.

To find out more about the project, the best source is the Alphabet Superset page itself or Campbell Walker’s video about it. To see more of my paintings as part of this challenge and my progress, you can search for Alphabet Superset on this site or click on the Alphabet Superset category here or above.

Switching Mediums from Gouache to Digital Art (still in Gouachy style)

I started my project as a gouache project, and I thought I would paint it all in one, or two Etchr B5 hot press sketchbooks. Over the past few paintings, I had been considering switching to using Procreate, and as of J, I have bitten the bullet and made the switch to painting the rest of the series in Procreate. I am still using Gouache and Gouache-like brushes in Procreate to match the sort of style I like and am happy with the results so far.

Why switch?

Reason 1: The main reason is that I found that for the level of detail I wanted to put into these, Procreate offered me much more flexibility. I kept thinking I could do a better job of most of the paintings I’ve done if I had the luxury of doing them much bigger or doing them in something like Procreate. When I started this project, I was an absolute Procreate newbie, then I started using it to sketch thumbnails and options and once I became a bit more comfortable using Procreate in a way that works for me, it was hard not to switch for this project.

Reason 2: Another reason is that it is much more portable than carrying all of my (very beloved) gouache paints with me while I’m travelling. I am currently back on the road so to speak, and so while I do have some art materials with me including gouache (I absolutely love the tactile feeling of brushes and pens and markers still), it is a much smaller collection than what I’d like to bring with me to do these paintings and have fun with them in the same way. That’s just where I’m at right now, but you can absolutely do great paintings with just a basic set of gouache. It is just that for right now and these paintings, that feels more restrictive than I would like it to be.

Reason 3: For paintings this size, I like painting with much more space than I usually have while travelling if I were to use my gouache supplies. I am a spread-out-on-the-table, sometimes multiple tables type of painter if I have the space for it, which is not as practical when travelling.

Reason 4: Finally, I really wanted to learn to use Procreate better, so I’m using the rest of this project as an opportunity to develop my Procreate skills to create paintings in the styles I like.

Now, here’s part 10: (Comb-crested) Jacanas!

What are (Comb-crested Jacanas)?

Comb-crested Jacanas (Irediparra gallinacea) are a beautiful, cute waterbird often seen walking over lilypads and other leavy matter floating on the water in tropical freshwater wetlands.

It gets its “comb-crested” name from its “comb” on the top of its head. It is mainly black across the head and wings and has a light cream to brown colouring elsewhere.

According to the Australian Bird Guide, it is unique among other common Australian waterbirds in that it has “enormously long” tows and claws - which I’ve tried to depict here.

Their range extends from the Kimberley in the north of Western Australia down to northeast New South Wales.

One of the more interesting things about jacanas is that it is the male that builds their floating nests, incubates and looks after the young birds. This includes carrying them or the eggs under their wings to safer areas. We saw a dad with two chicks in Yellow Water in Kakadu, attentively looking out for predators.

References and for a bit more information about the Comb-crested Jacana:

• The Australian Bird Guide, 2019 revised edition, CSIRO Publishing, (click here for my blog post about the bird guide)

• Comb-crested jacana | Kakadu National Park (parksaustralia.gov.au)

• Comb-crested Jacana | BIRDS in BACKYARDS

Where had we seen them?

We first saw Jacanas in the Mamukala wetland in Kakadu National Park in April 2022. We saw them again in Kakadu in Yellow Water in June 2022 and then again in many other wetlands in the north of the Northern Territory, northern WA and in Tropical North Queensland around Cairns.

Why Paint them?

This is a painting I'd been looking forward to doing for a long time, and never got around to until now. I was initially thinking of doing these under ‘C’ week but given I decided to paint the Jabiru in ‘B’ because it technically is a Black-necked Stork, I decided these will be the J project.

These birds are so much fun to watch as they hop about lotus leaves and lilypads looking for their next meal, and the composition of this piece was more or less set in my mind from the very first time we saw them.

Process - Part 1: Find Photo References, Sketch

The photo references I used here were a combination of my reference photos and photos taken by Scott. They were also from a number of different settings over the many different times we saw these cute birds.

As this composition had been in my head more than a year and a half before I got around to painting it, deciding on that was easy! I just sketched what I’d had percolating for a while.

I used Procreate on the iPad to sketch it and was pretty happy with it so on to painting!

Process - Part 2: Planning

So, unlike the previous posts, I didn’t really have to work out the paints I would use or background in this one. I was happy to use the background I’d roughly sketched in, and the colours well, in digital apps, you have all the colours you could possibly want, so this will be a short section.

The main things I had to decide on were:

• Resolution [1200 dpi at B5 size: 176mm x 250mm]

• Layers [Because of the large size I was left with 6 layers]

• The brushes I would use [I ended up using the Procreate in-built gouache brush and two other brushes that I’d modified from that gouache brush]

Did I miss the tactile feeling of gouache? Absolutely! I also missed choosing paint colours and thinking about the brushes I’d need to use to create the effects I wanted, but the upsides of using Procreate were that I had a ton of options in terms of adjusting the position of things as I went along, which I really enjoyed. It allowed me to continue being creative throughout the process.

That said, while some problems are reduced in Procreate, there were others - mainly how to achieve the painterly effects I enjoy when using gouache. I hope to keep experimenting to work it out.

Process - Part 3: Painting and Refining

I was not too worried about detail in the background elements, but I did really want the jacanas to be nicely detailed which was one of the benefits of doing this in Procreate. In B5 size, I don’t think I would have been able to paint the jacana in any detail.

For the background I used a few shades of teal/turquoise to create a gradient, also with my gouache brush to keep it as consistent with my previous paintings as possible. I did use a base background colour a very light blue but then painted over that in a separate layer for the actual visible background.

The next layer was the leaves. I initially kept the background leaves and the large leaf in the foreground in two separate layers and combined them when I needed more layers towards the end. I also added another layer for the flowers mid-way through.

Similarly, I had one layer for each of the jacanas while I was working on them before combining them towards the end.

The final layers are as follows: Background colour; background; leaves; flowers; adult Jacana; Jacana chicks; signature

There was a lot of adjusting and painting and smudging in my process. I love the smudge tool! I used it a ton in the background and for smoothing out the leaves as well as smoothing down the feathers.

After 13 hours and 14 minutes of total tracked time in Procreate - here it is, finished!

Lessons Learnt & Thing I Might Try Going Forward

1. Playing around with brushes and the two brushes I modified for myself were great, so hopefully I’ll learn to create a couple more that will do what I need them to do.

2. Layers - always keep an eye on the layers you’re working on. It is the most annoying thing when you’ve spent 5-10 minutes on something in the wrong layer.

Next: K - Kimberley Rock Monitor

The Kimberley Rock Monitor was another painting I was really really looking forward to. It is finished now, and I’ll write a post about it soon. This reptile was a really cool encounter for us in the El-Questro park in the Kimberley. One of my many wildlife highlights!