The Devil's Cormorant

Time to introduce another non-equine repaint (don't worry, I'll be back to horses in my next post!), one of my favourite birds - the cormorant.

The Papo cormorant had already caught my eye earlier this year, but the moulded lettering along the front of the wings was a bit of a deal-breaker on an original finish model - just too obvious, too obtrusive.

After I'd painted my fox, I was wondering what other animal I was most inspired by, which would be another meaningful choice to carry on this new direction of wildlife repaints. And then I realised - if I was going to be customising anyway, I could get the coveted cormorant to repaint and deal with the ugly lettering at the same time!

Here he is, straight from the packaging...

I really like how they've given him a metallic sheen, by rubbing gold over the sculpted feather texture. As with the fox, it's not that he's got a bad paintjob to start with, just that I really wanted to play with painting and see what I could do to make him look even better.

Unfortunately, his tail had been pushed out of shape by the plastic protective support he came in. But I held his tail in a glass of boiling water, intending to try pushing the bent bit back to shape, and as soon as it got hot enough for the plastic to soften, it popped back to exactly the right position, without me even touching it. So if you collect bird figures and happen to get a dented cormorant, dunk him!

You can see another slight issue he had on arrival - he tips back onto his tail, with his toes in the air. The centre of gravity was just off, meaning he couldn't balance upright on a flat level surface. This was also fixed with the hot water trick : hold his legs under the surface a few seconds to soften the plastic, then take him out and stand him on the counter, supporting him by the wings while the legs cool down and the plastic goes solid in the corrected position.

At first I tried carving the lettering off, but because the Papo plastic doesn't sand down very well, I couldn't get a smooth enough finish, so in the end he had to have some patched feathers!

There's his two little patches of resculpted wing (I rubbed them down to smooth off the rough edges once the Milliput was dry).

Once it was time to get painting, I chose two reference photos...

This one I took myself, for the white marking to match a cormorant I've actually met and photographed, rather than something more interesting but copied from a total stranger! They have different white patches in their breeding plumage than the rest of the year, and it does vary quite a bit from bird to bird.

And because my photo didn't show the wing feather colouring particularly well, I found this really bright and clear professional shot on google as my main painting reference.

So here he is - my first ever bird repaint!

I tried to get as much colour in to his wing feathers as possible, the reference photo linked really shows how much the tone varies, even though they just look like a black bird at a distance, up close there's a lot of deep brown, and pale highlights. The only part I didn't repaint was his eyes - my blue paint had set solid so I just went carefully round his old eyes, and gave each a speck of clear nail varnish afterwards to make them shiny.

He balances very nicely on this little resin tree trunk! I used a light application of metallic gold acrylic paint to give him some of the same sheen seen in his original paintwork, just a tiny dot of paint rubbed between my fingers then gently over the surface so it caught the tiny tiny sparkles without covering or changing his base colour. There's a little bit of dark green bloom on him, too, but just painted in with diluted viridian over his black, cos I didn't have any metallic green paint!

And here he is posing for an all-round photoshoot, with a nature book opened at a relevant page to provide a fitting background - all my horsey ones are fields with fences or walls, or grassy landscapes, so I needed something totally new for a water bird!

I love my little cormorant! The title of this post, by the way, comes from the excellent book about these fascinating birds, The Devil's Cormorant - A Natural History, by Richard J King. I couldn't find a copy in the UK, so had to have one sent over from a library clearance in the US!