Mandarin Duck

No one knows how this Mandarin Duck came to be floating in the middle of Central Park in NYC.  But everyone agrees it's the most beautiful duck there!

One of the things I do to get my creative juices going is to print out a photo and put it into my watercolor sketchbook.  Then I try to duplicate every color I see in the photo.  This duck was a particular challenge since you don't really see these color combinations in most nature photos.  Hot pink, teal & ultramarine blue, purple, rust, brown, white and black.  The reflections in the water gave me a chance to gray down the colors as well as to add various shades of dark green to my palette.  

This exercise does two things:  improves your color mixing abilities so you can achieve just the right hue, and it trains your rye to be more alert to color in all it's variations.  I bet if you do this with a friend, each of you will come up with a different palette from the same photo.  (Hint:  everyone sees color differently!)