Two Birds, One Palette

Stand on almost any British seabird cliff in late spring — the Farne Islands, the Pembrokeshire coast, a headland in the west of Scotland, the long drop of a Yorkshire headland — and you will find these two birds sharing the same ledge while offering you two completely different painting problems. The puffin arrives as a cluster of bright, toy-like shapes: an orange bill, a black cap, a white cheek, orange legs. The razorbill arrives as a slim blade of black and white with one pale line ruled neatly across its bill.

Painted together, they teach more about simplification and colour mixing than a dozen studio exercises. The trick is to treat them as shapes first and birds second, then let the colour do the charming.

Seeing the Simplified Form

Before you mix anything, spend ten minutes drawing silhouettes. Squint until the details vanish and the bird becomes a block. Work at arm's length on a small sheet, using a brush and a single grey wash rather than a pencil, and give each shape no more than fifteen seconds.

• Puffin head — a rounded wedge, widest at the cheek, with the bill reading as a separate chunky triangle bolted on at a slightly downward angle.
• Razorbill head — a narrow axe-head, the crown flat, the bill continuing the line of the skull almost without interruption.
• Puffin body — a plump oval that sits low and upright, with very little neck to show.
• Razorbill body — a teardrop tipped forward, the tail lifted clear of the rock.

Get those four shapes right and the painting is half finished. Get them wrong and no amount of bill detail will rescue it.

Mixing the Puffin's Bill

The bill is where beginners come unstuck, usually by reaching for the brightest orange in the box. That reads as plastic. Real bill colour is rich but broken, and it is surrounded by cool greys that make it sing without shouting.

• Outer plate — cadmium orange knocked back with a touch of yellow ochre and the smallest amount of cadmium red. The ochre stops it looking synthetic.
• Base triangle — a blue-grey mixed from ultramarine and a hint of burnt sienna, cooled with white. Keep it flat and clean-edged.
• Yellow band — cadmium yellow pale, not lemon. It sits between orange and blue-grey and needs to hold its own.
• Rosette at the gape — a soft yellow-orange, applied as a single confident mark.

Mix small quantities. Bill colour looks different against white feathers than it does against black, so test each mix on the paper, not in the palette well.

Black Without a Tube of Black

Razorbills are the better teacher here. Their plumage is glossier and more blue than a puffin's, and straight black from the tube will flatten it immediately. Instead, build your darks from transparent pigments: ultramarine with burnt sienna for a warm black, Prussian blue with burnt sienna for a cooler, deeper one. Both can be thinned to a lovely blue-grey for the distant birds on the stack.

Reserve your darkest mixture for the shadow beneath the bill and the underside of the folded wing. Leave the sunlit crown and mantle as a mid-tone with a little white lifted out for sheen. The white line across the razorbill's bill, and the thin white stripe running from bill to eye, should be painted last with pure titanium white and a brush that comes to a fine point. On a wet ground those lines will bleed; wait for the black to be touch-dry.

Lessons from Falconry Heritage

British falconry has always been a discipline of looking closely, and wildlife artists inherit more from it than we sometimes admit. Falconers speak of a bird's "make" — its proportions, weight and condition read at a glance — and that is precisely the skill you need on a cliff ledge. Hooded birds, jesses, and the old sporting portraits of hawks and falcons also left us a lasting visual language: restrained palettes, careful feather groups, and a habit of describing plumage structure rather than texture.

The coastal fowling traditions of places like St Kilda and the Farne Islands added another thread. Generations who climbed these cliffs for eggs and birds knew every variation in a puffin's bill through the season and every shade of a razorbill's back. That knowledge is worth borrowing. Study a bird's make before you study its markings, and remember that a patch of grey mixed accurately is more convincing than a dozen carefully painted feathers.

From Notebook to Finished Study

Work in the field with a small sketchbook, a couple of greys and one warm accent, then take notes on light direction, wind and time of day. Seabirds on a cliff almost always face into the wind, which gives you consistent, repeatable angles to draw.

Back in the studio, choose a mid-tone paper or lay a warm grey ground — it lets the whites of a puffin's cheek glow without looking chalky. Keep your palette to roughly six colours: ultramarine, burnt sienna, cadmium orange, yellow ochre, titanium white and a warm black you mix yourself. Paint the big shapes first, check the silhouette against your thumb, then let the bill and the white lines be the last, sharpest notes. Done well, one puffin and one razorbill on the same ledge say everything about the coast.