Painting a Loose, Dreamy Baby Hummingbird in Watercolor

Hi, I'm Valerie Englehart, and today I want to share with you how I painted a baby hummingbird nestled in its little nest with a lovely foliage background. This painting was created on a 4x6 hot press block by Fluid (I think it's by Speedball), which has about 15 sheets of 140-pound paper and only cost me around eight bucks. It was perfect for experimenting and getting ready for the holiday gift-giving season.

This piece was actually a viewer suggestion—someone wanted to see a video of me painting a hummingbird. The last hummingbird I did, I used watercolor pens, which was fun, but it's not quite the same as pulling out your paintbrush and mixing your paints. So I was definitely due for another hummingbird painting!

Choosing My Colors and Getting Started

I grabbed my palette of Rockwell Art paints, which I absolutely love. While I tend to return to the same few colors, I was a little shocked at myself for not using Palaiba Diamond Blue in this one! Instead, I started with a purple color called God's Back. What I love about this color is that it separates into a very warm purple with some blue tones. Many of these Rockwell paints granulate beautifully, and when you add water, they separate to create a gorgeous variety of tones—some even create an ombré effect.

I pulled out Onat Diamond Yellow to make the hummingbird warmer, since many of the other colors I was planning to use are cool colors (with the exception of Magic Wizard, which is one of my favorites). Even though I put down some of that diamond yellow, I quickly moved to Tree Sprite—a green with purple undertones—and I ended up defaulting to this color for basically the rest of the piece.

Painting the Baby Hummingbird

Using my size 8 round brush by Silver Black Velvet, I used the tip to create little feather textures by dotting and leaving white space between the feathers. I added two bold strokes for the tail feathers, then connected the head to the tail. Have you ever seen a hummingbird nest? They are so tiny, and the way baby hummingbirds just pop out of them is absolutely adorable! We have lots of hummingbirds around us, and when they make noise, it's this scratchy sound. The males are really territorial too—they'll go at each other like a gladiator match!

I pulled out Magic Wizard next—a warm brown color that separates into this gorgeous golden yellow. I usually use it to warm up areas, and since this painting ended up quite cool overall, having that warmth brought this special luminance to the piece. I lifted some of the tail feather to create difference in texture. One thing about hot press paper is that when I add water, I tend to get a lot of water texture, which is great because that's exactly how I like to paint!

Building the Nest with Connected Shapes

I used clean water to drag the pigment that was around my hummingbird down to create the nest. I wanted the shapes to connect—I wanted bits of that hummingbird to merge into the nest. For the nest itself, I used Elf's Wing, a brown with purple undertones (yes, there's a theme here—lots of colors with purple undertones, which is why this painting has a cooler feel overall).

I like to connect my shapes, so the hummingbird connects to the nest, and the nest connects to branches. For the nest, I kept my brush strokes horizontal but slightly curved, trying to keep it organic and varying the thickness of the stroke. I introduced water because I love those textures—watercolor is all about water control and how wet your paper is.

As my hummingbird dried, I went back in to add more detail and dots. I like to paint loose and dreamy, and I don't like adding tons of detail—especially on such a small piece of paper. I keep things really loose and almost abstract. Anywhere the hummingbird has white, I just leave the white of the paper. The beak is already nice and long, so I don't need to add anything else. When working so small, if I add too much detail in one area, I'd need to add detail everywhere to make it cohesive, and that's just way too much effort for me. Plus, I'd lose the effect I'm going for.

Adding Texture with a Palette Knife

I pulled out a palette knife and started scraping and scratching across the surface of the nest to create areas where twigs would catch the light. It's important to pay attention to how wet your paper is at this point. The paint needs to still be wet but drying—the sheen should have disappeared. When you scrape at this stage, you're lifting the paint off. If the paint and paper are still very wet and you do those scraping motions, the paint will run into that area and those white areas will actually turn very dark.

I will say that this technique does damage the paper, so when you do it, be confident! This is a loose painting, so I also created some loose edges by adding clean water and bleeding it away from wherever I touched—like the edge of the nest and a couple of leaves. I'm a lost-and-found edge kind of painter.

Painting the Foliage Background

After adding more of that purple God's Back and painting negatively around some of those marks for the nest (allowing shadows to be created and letting highlights pop), I needed to add a background. I went in with Tree Sprite, and honestly, I didn't have too much of a plan. I just went in loose, dotting in colors that were already in my composition. I didn't want to add any new colors at this point because that would break the cohesion I had going on.

I threw some Magic Wizard up there too. Magic Wizard is a staining color, which helped me out quite a bit later when I did some stencil lifting (more on that in a moment!). I was careful with those little puddles coming down—I had my paper at an angle, and I wanted the color to come up to the hummingbird but not fall over it. So I paid close attention to how wet my paper was to avoid drips.

I turned my paper upside down so the water would flow away from my hummingbird, and I could carefully paint really close to it without risking drops covering my subject. I added more water to create more texture and then pulled out more of that dark purple to splatter.

Because the paper was still wet, those splatters started to diffuse. Part of me wondered if I should have left them with hard edges—that might have been nice too! So next time I do something like this, I need to be strong and leave those hard lines. I added a little more to the nest while the paper was upside down, creating a bit of separation between the hummingbird and the nest.

Once I placed my paper flat again, I tapped in some clean water for more movement and filled in any white gaps I didn't want. I really loved the misty, moody, jewel-tone effect I had going on in the background. But remember—watercolor dries paler, so it wasn't going to stay that rich.

Because this block has glue on the sides, I lifted water from the edges to prevent blooms from forming vertically and pushing inward. While the top was still damp, I flicked in a little more water because I love creating texture and that sparkle effect. I'm a splashy painter—controlled chaos, if you will!

The Magic of Stencil Lifting

Once everything dried, I realized it needed more movement. So I grabbed one of my stencils and a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (not sponsored!) and started picking out parts of the foliage where I wanted to do some lifting. This is where Magic Wizard really shines—because it's a staining color, it stains the paper a golden yellow.

So even though I lifted paint off the paper, anywhere that Magic Wizard was didn't leave white paper—it left a golden yellow shine. This makes it look like sunlight is filtering through the leaves! This was a happy accident. I wasn't planning this from the very beginning; I just thought, 'Let's see what happens,' and it turned out beautifully.

I don't use this scrubbing technique very often—I can't even remember the last time I did something like this! But it's fun, and as long as you pick the area properly, it doesn't look so uniform. It doesn't necessarily even look like I pulled out a stencil.

I paid careful attention to the path of light I was creating. I wanted it to form an S-shape—one of my favorite paths of light. I started the light in the upper right section, brought it down toward the beak of the hummingbird, curved it around to the back of the hummingbird, and then down toward the bottom to create that S-shaped path of light.

One word of warning though: don't overdo it with the stencil! You want it to enhance your painting, not overwhelm it.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it—my finished baby hummingbird painting! I love how the loose, dreamy quality turned out, with those jewel tones and the way the light filters through the background. Working on hot press paper with granulating paints really creates those beautiful water textures I'm always after.

Thanks so much for reading, and happy painting!