Painting progress as of today

[gloriana]

Feel free to skip if you don't want to see things in mid paint :) :)

So the Vermeer has moved to the next stage, and the Caravaggio has been begun. It's the first time I'm using full Renaissance technique, so - as much to aid my failing memory as anything - details and further pics under the cut.

Comments

[gloriana]

Well, if you are painting the way Vermeer did, you apply the colours in very thin layers of glaze (ie maybe 10% of coloured paint to 90% oil/turps/varnish mix), so they go on translucently; and he would do up to thirty layers like that. The plus is that the light actually enters the paint layers and bounces around in there before it reaches your eyes, so there is a depth and lustre you can't get any other way. But since the paint is only slowly building up towards being opaque, it's actually the greyscale underneath that helps to determine the black/white spectrum of the final picture, and even much of the fine detail.

(And it was often a sepia scale rather than a grey scale, so warmer rather than neutral; but I had some tube greys specifically designed for the purpose, so I used them :))

Caravaggio was a little more direct, so apparently his backgrounds, for instance, would have been laid in towards the end, in a few layers of black/burnt umber mix which would have had a higher ratio of paint to oil/turps. Though the hair on St Peter is going to be a nightmare - it had a whispiness that I shudder to think of doing over the background.

[cbtreks]

Thank you. Some day I'd like to take drawing classes. I draw occasionally - I'm neither good nor bad, just average. (Literally - I took a drawing class at a local college when I was a senior in high school and earned a C.) Perhaps when I'm done with this library science degree, I'll do that. In any case, I like learning why people do things the way they do when they're painting or drawing.