Toucan Painting

I have been doing a lot of water colour painting recently, so I decided for a change I would do a large acrylic painting. I had the idea to do some kind of tropical bird, I thought maybe a parrot or a flamingo, but whilst browsing images on Pinterest I spotted a photograph of a Toucan and thought I’d give it a go!

I started by painting the background a vivid green colour and then proceeded to paint some large tropical leaves all over the canvas.

I then roughly painted where I wanted my Toucan to be, his perch and some more layers of tropical type plants.

I continued to add layers of details to the Toucan and the surrounding plants to build up a vivid depth of colour and to make the Toucan appear to be surrounded by a deep tropical forest.

Once the Toucan was nearly finished I decided that I needed to add even more depth to the background and to make the plants in the foreground a brighter colour, so I added some purple tones, some shadows and some white highlights to the plants and background foliage.

Finally I added some more details and vines to the branch. And here’s the finished painting! It took around 15 hours to paint.

This painting is not for sale currently, but let me know if you’d like to see more painting like this and check out what artwork I have for sale currently HERE.