Red-headed Barbet Acrylic Print

This small painting of a Red-headed Barbet (Eubucco bourcierii) is one of my all-time favourites, and like many studies of the kind I like to do. It shows a small, colourful barbet found in Central America and parts of tropical South America. Barbets are probably more or less related to such groups of birds as woodpeckers and toucans, and I think of these as the “middle birds”, the non-aquatic, non-predatory, non-songbird species that also includes cuckoos, parrots, trogons, hornbills, kingfishers, rollers, broadbills and so on. I love painting them. Most species are tropical, and I call them “middle” because in bird books and checklists of birds they are usually in the middle, with a lineage not as ancient as species such as loons and cormorants, but not as recently evolved as the songbirds. What makes this little painting and others like it so pleasing to me is that it allowed me to exercise my knowledge of my subject by showing diverse poses from different angles, all...