Painting collage "Window to Spring" with birds, tree and blossoms: Process Post

All week I've had this idea for a painting with birds and a tree and some pink and yellow. So here it is, with process photos. I started with a quick sketch to lay out the tree and bird areas:

Then I added a wash of some red/pink watercolor (technically, it's Quinacridone Rose) on top and some yellow ("mustard" color) gouache on the bottom:

I pulled out the glass plate, brayer and water-based Speedball block printing inks and inked up a few stencils with pink and red (always a lovely choice):

I was thinking about what to do with the tree, and remembered this interesting marbled paper I made and talked about in this post from March:

I cut it up and used matte gel medium to paste it to the paper in the shape of a tree with a branch. Doesn't it give it a nice 'knotty' texture? I really like the bursts of lime green throughout:

Time to add some birds. I looked through my old photos of birds and re-sketched a few birds from previous sketches I had made, shown in this post from last year. This is one of my bird photos:

Here is a rough sketch I made of the bird, in the basic shape of the oval from my quick outline at the top of this post:

I made three sketches on paper and cut around the lines, then placed them over the painting to determine layout. I liked the idea of the one on the left looking back at the other two, and decided to make that the mother bird:

When I sketched the birds onto the painting I sized down the other two birds a little bit so they would look more like baby birds:

I added a bit of color to the birds while I thought about how to color them overall:

Then I started to add in some blossoms and leaves and other shapes, and add more color to the tree and finished off the birds.

I added details with a black fine tip Montana Acrylic Marker. There was an incident with the marker in the upper right when I brushed against some wet triangles with my hand - the stuff is like India ink and was pretty much impossible to control. I went over it with white paint but it just turned gray and became quite a mess. So I felt compelled to cover it with a bunch of color which changed my original idea to have those pink triangles up there. I decided to extend the orange color to the far left of the blossom/branch part to try and balance out the heaviness of the dark color on the right. Finally, I stamped on the letters: "WINDOW TO SPRING" and stopped there: