Painting Emus and an Echidna (Alphabet Superset Project Part 5)
Part 5: E - Emus and an Echidna
Hello! If you’ve been following my Alphabet Superset Project, welcome back. This post is a bit later than it was supposed to be, but here it is! If this is your first time here and you have no idea why this is Part 5, and what the Alphabet Superset Project is, the first post in the series might help. But also, here is a quick recap:
For 5 weeks (actually 6 because there was a week’s break in between), I have been painting an Australian animal or an animal that visits Australia that I’ve seen and preferably one I have my own photos of. I will continue doing this until April 2024 (hopefully) as part of a project/challenge called the Alphabet Superset, the brainchild of Youtuber (among other things) Campbell Walker aka Struthless. Each week will be painting a different animal according to the letter assigned that week following alphabetical order i.e. week 1= A, week 2= B, week 3= C etc. My main reasons are to have a consistent means of slowly painting all the wonderful animals I’ve been lucky to see while we’d been camping around Australia in 2021 and 2022 (with a short stint in Darwin) and on other little walks and nature excursions.
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.
Now, here’s part 5: Emus and Echidna
What are Emus? What are Echidnas?
The Emu is Australia’s tallest bird. It is flightless, and has shaggy ochre, brown and grey plumage. It looks a bit like an ostrich. Kind of, in that they are tall, flightless and have a long neck. It is only found in Australia, and is pretty widespread across the continent except the very arid desert and dense forests. The area we saw them in was a bit of bushland as well as woodland near a riverbed.
They make an unmistakable booming, drumming sound and I actually thought someone was drumming nearby before I realised it was the Emus (it was the first time I’d heard Emus!). It is a beautiful sound though if you like drumming sounds. Two interesting facts about them (from the Australian Museum website) are that they can move around a lot - hundreds of kilometres within their range, and the male of the species incubates and looks after the young Emus until about 4-6 months when they leave.
Echidnas are a monotreme i.e. a mammal that lays eggs. It only lays one egg at a time. They’re really cute, and spiky. Unmistakable for anything else because of their spikes, and really, similarly to the Platypus, they don’t look like anything else around. They are also sometimes known as a spiny Anteater, mainly because they have spikes or spines and they break into ant and termite nests for food (using their tongues to scoop up the insects). The one we saw had its head buried under a rock, possibly looking for ants initially, though it probably kept its head down after that because we were around. We tried not to disturb it, kept our distance, took some photos and moved straight on.
Echidnas are found throughout Australia, although I’d never seen one until our camping trip. I still am yet to see another actually. Just the one. In the Ikara-Flinders Ranges. Scott’s seen another one in the wild down near Port Elliot but yep despite camping from Adelaide to Darwin and then across the north of WA down to Karijini and then Perth over many months, we didn’t see another Echidna, so possibly not as easy to spot as one might hope.
References and for more information about the Emu:
The Australian Bird Guide, 2019 revised edition, CSIRO Publishing, (click here for my blog post about the bird guide)
About the Echidna:
Where had we seen them?
We’d seen Emus at the gorgeous Mount Remarkable National Park right at the start of our camping trip. This national park was a stunning surprise, and we saw a ton of wildlife there particularly as we were there in the winter, when everything was quite green.
The Echidna was seen not much further up in the Ikara-Flinders Ranges, near the Aroona Campground. I really loved both of these national parks. Actually, you’ll probably hear me say I loved insert-national-park-here a lot - I don’t think there was a single one along the way I didn’t enjoy. That said, the Ikara-Flinders Ranges were gorgeous and definitely worth a visit for the wildlife as well as their natural and geological history.
Why Paint them?
Deciding on the E category was easy given the two iconic Australian animals - the Emu and the Echidna begin with E and we had been lucky enough to see both.
Although these are probably easier to encounter in Australia than many of the other animals we’ve seen and that I have and will be painting, I have still only had one sighting of an Echidna, and two of an Emu. My first sighting of an Emu was a few years ago, seeing one standing along the roadside as we were driving up the coast a bit from Perth and then the ones at Mount Remarkable.
The Emus at Mount Remarkable are the only ones I’ve properly seen, and spent any time around. It was also such a memorable experience listening to their booming sounds. Likewise, the Echidna was so well camouflaged that Scott had initially walked right past it and I had to softly indicate to him it was there. It felt like such a lucky sighting and yet we had seen so much along the way that I’d not gotten around to painting these gorgeous creatures. So here was the perfect opportunity.
Process - Part 1: Find Photo References, Sketch
I had a few good reference photos for both of these animals thanks to Scott, so it was just a matter of picking which particular Emus to paint. I then roughly blocked in where the animals would be on the page.
The next step was to work out what background I’d paint. I tried a few compositions on Procreate against the greener lush woodland settings with a lot of trees and a drier orangey sandy scrubby setting. I decided on the orangey sandy, rocky side of a slope that we’d seen the Emus on in the end just for the extra sense of space the composition gave, but I might some day go back to do a painting with the greener setting.
Process - Part 2: Work out Colours, Paint the Background, Start Painting
For this one, working out the colours was mostly a matter of using what was already on my palette and adding some extra colours when needed.
I already had some green, brown and ochre mixtures on my palette, which I topped up with a few colours during the painting. As I am still playing with the Holbein Irodori colours and sets, I used paints from those sets as much as possible from those sets.
For the Background:
Ouni/Orange (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Oudo/Light Ochre (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Kohaku/Amber (Holbein Irodori Artists’ Gouache)
Earthy Colours - Animals and Rocks
Susutake/Smoked Bamboo (Holbein Irodori Artists’ Gouache)
Bengara/Iron Oxide Red (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Oudo/Light Ochre (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Ouni/Orange (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Greens and Greenery:
Senzaimidori/Pine Tree Green (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Uguisu/Elm Green (Holbein Irodori Artists' Gouache)
Terre Verte (Holbein Artists’ Gouache)
Primary Yellow (Holbein Irodori Artists’ Gouache) (already on palette)
Kihada/Amur Cork Yellow (Holbein Irodori Artists’ Gouache)
General Colours:
Primary White (Holbein Artists’ Gouache)
Zinc White (Holbein Artists’ Gouache)
Primary Black (Holbein Artists’ Gouache) (already on the palette)
You really don’t need this many colours, but I am enjoying having them and testing them out. So far my biggest uses of my new colours have been mostly in the orange-brown-green range but I’ll write about the Irodori paints soon, now that I’ve had over a month to play with them.
Process - Part 3: Checking in and Adjusting as I go
Once I’d painted the background and roughly blocked in the Emus, I took a photo and used procreate to get a better sense of the colours I’d use and a super rough composition.
Process - Part 4: Adding the Echidna and Details
The background was a composite of many different photos and so this was a painting I had to keep going back to, to see if everything still made sense in context. It was a slow process of adding rocks and greenery mindfully.
Process - Part 5: Refine, Refine, Refine
Once it was mostly done, I took it into procreate again to see if adding more greenery would make it look better or if it would ruin it. I’ve been enjoying using procreate this way to test some ideas before putting it to paper. Such a useful tool. I’m also trying to learn procreate a bit more to see if I enjoy doing more full illustrations in it but that’s still a slow work in progress.
Here is the piece finally finished! I am pretty pleased with it though I am surprised that others like it more than I do. It was a ton of fun to paint and I did learn a few things through this process.
Lessons Learnt
Rocks take time. Or at least they take me time, so choose a simpler composition if you want to get something finished in a week.
This is more a style thing - while I am able to add shadows, I don’t tend to like to at least in these types of pieces. I hadn’t realised that that was a choice I’d made in this series already. None of the 4 previous paintings in this series used actual shadows though they did show light and dark areas on the animals. That was tricky in this scene because you have to add some semblance of shadow to rocks to make them look like rocks. This is something I might explore as I delve into learning more about art styles and traditions.
I like having a clear composition planned from the start, with room for a conversation with the piece as it evolves. At the moment, I often (though not always) enjoy the flexibility of working out what the page needs as I go when it comes to details and where small trees and scrubs will be.
Next Week (This week, week of the 16th): F - Frilled-Necked Lizard
So many exciting animals to paint through this series! Frill-necked lizards are something I’d wanted to see since I was 10, when we came to Australia for a short road trip, and I bought a calendar of Australian animals. Needless to say, frill-necked lizards featured in it and I thought they were the coolest thing ever! I also thought they were a lot smaller than they actually are. We saw two in our travels, and like so many of our chance encounters with wildlife, it felt really special. I always feel so lucky and privileged to have seen all the wonderful animals I’ve seen.