River Jewel - How I Painted This Kingfisher in Oils

I do love this painting, so let me talk you through how it came together, step by step.

An oil painting of a Kingfisher by Marion Dutton

The underpainting

This one starts with an underpainting, like most of my realistic bird paintings. This is where I get my values sorted before I even think about colour, it's the map for the whole piece. I used a few different tools such as typist erasers and cotton buds, to wipe back the lighter areas and push into the darker ones, so by the end of this stage the tonal structure for the whole painting is already there.

An underpainting of a Kingfisher in oils by Marion Dutton

Blocking in the four values

Once that’s dry, I premix my four values — two lights and two darks — and block those straight over the underpainting. This four-value method is the backbone of everything I teach, and it’s where the kingfisher painting really starts to take shape.

Having these key colours premixed gives me a reliable starting point and keeps the values balanced across the painting. They aren’t the only colours I’ll use, I can still mix intuitively as I work,but those four values give me something solid to mix from and help keep the whole painting working together.

The background

I kept this deliberately loose. You can still see the brush marks if you look closely. It's there on purpose, so the loose background sits against the fine detail on the bird and gives the whole oil painting that realistic but still painterly finish.

Glazing

Once the colour layer was fully dry, I worked deep glazes of Phthalo Blue over the kingfisher. This is where glazing really comes into its own. Because Phthalo Blue is transparent, it builds depth and saturation without covering the colour beneath, creating those rich, jewel-like blues that are so characteristic of a kingfisher.

The final details

The final stage was adding the opaque highlights, worked wet-into-wet directly into the wet glaze. The transparent colour underneath provides the depth and richness, while the opaque paint brings back the light and allows me to add those finer details without losing the softness of the painting.

How it all comes together

This is the MazArt Method in practice: establish the underpainting, build the four values, then develop the colour and detail through layers and glazing where needed.

For this style of realism, I don’t try to achieve everything in a single layer. The painting is built gradually, allowing each stage to do its job, and it’s that layered approach that creates the depth and richness in the finished piece.

River Jewel is one of the complete painting projects inside MazArt Academy, where you’ll find the reference photo, tracing and full step-by-step video lessons. If you’d like to paint it with me, you can find the complete tutorial inside the Academy.

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