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Ok, I like these days, as I did all the work on another day.  Doing this really helps me get my second wind and am hoping that I hit the wall and it will be downhill now.  Now it is just the frosting and most fun part to any picture, adding color.  As threatened, yep another experiment, I went ahead and tried to see what I would get if I used pan pastels over the grisaille of black/white/gray tones.  Because the pans are so transparent they did a good job of covering but not totally  obliterating the under painting and now it gives me nice soft grays in the white coat and wrinkles without hard edges.   Don't think it should be a problem being over the acrylic, but would either have to seal with workable fixative or recommend it be framed behind glass.  Although anything I do on paper I recommend framing even if it is acrylic - and for acrylics, whether on paper or canvas I also spray varnish it just like you would an oil painting.  Why?? yo...

Ok, I took a big step back as I really wasn't happy with the direction that I was going yesterday.  I mentioned to my husband that this was really harder than I thought, to copy a master, and his comment was so perfect - "That's why they are masters"!  Yeah.  I decided that I wanted to use burnt umber as the underpainting rather do the grays.  It is warmer and I want to add very light flesh glazes so wanted a warmer under painting.   I want to keep the reds to a minimum as it appears Vermeer used a lot of yellow through this whole painting and think the brunt under will add the reddish tint without actually using a lot of red. So first thing I did was to make a value chart for brunt umber to get an idea and feel for the paint application, also looked up what the complement, blue, is to create the gray tone.   Then I did some more studying and realized that the grisaille has to be much lighter than what you really think it should be as it reall...

Ok, this project will probably be as slow as I am.  I always thought it would be so cool to be a copyist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and get to copy master works from history's most famous artists.  But for many various reasons ranging from the strict approval process to not being sure I could paint through all the ugly parts of painting the "old masters" while people are watching, that isn't possible.  But here is the slow part - I just figured out there are so many digital images of master works available I could paint on my own and learn - Duh!!!  My little box is such a small world. I wish more of my dear friend, Renate would rub off on me.  I should learn her from because she is fearless when it comes to "going for it" when painting.   She doesn't think can't.  She also found a challenge years ago where they painted from master works.  She produced some spectacular paintings while doing those challenges.  At t...