Day 29 - Marie Antoinette

After enjoying some modest success with watercolors, I decided to push myself to do a larger piece - a 5x5 of Marie Antoinette.  As a rule, I use reference photos, never an illustration or another artist's painting as my source and inspiration, but with an historical figure who predates photography, well, there's not much one can do.  So.  I decided to use one particular portrait of Marie Antoinette, treating it almost like a Master Study so that I could learn lessons about painting in general.

And here's what I noticed.  Like, immediately.  It's much easier (for me) to see shapes in paintings, rather than photographs.  That drove home for me how much I need to keep training my eyes to stop seeing cognitive units and see only the shapes they comprise.

Second - and this is big, too - the shadows all had colors.  Blue gray.  Rusty brown.  Slightly green.  How had I never thought to look for a range of colors in shadows when looking at photographs?!  (This is what happens when you're self-taught: You are always late to the damn party.)

This was super instructive, though, as I'll explain in the next entry.  Meanwhile, here's Marie, or rather "Let Them Eat Cake Doughnuts":