Finished and on hold for a while, I had been working on and off again on this piece as other projects have held my attention lately.

I mainly began with a charcoal drawing on a canvas, which for me feels more natural as I have had the most practice drawing with it throughout the years. I like the richness of value that you can get from it. I take a chamoi to it as a way to blend the strokes from the charcoal. I use a soft charcoal as I never could get used to the hard. mainly I use thin vine stumps. I was done with the drawing in around three to four days. This is a really long time as I could not just work around the clock.

I used a common fixitive to hold the image into place. I kept it very light as I only need it to be held in place and not to build up a sheen. Also I did not know what the fixitive would do unto the painting in the many years to follow.

I then used a Viridian Green, Mars Black, and Flake White scale to get a value scheme for an underpainting. The technique was used by a great number of masters to get the value right and extra depth in color harmony to their paintings. I did supplement Viridian Green in instead of the suggested Terra Cotta or Chromium Oxide Green that I have heard various other artists use and their techniques can be seen all over the web. One such artist is Michael Georges that he suggests on Wetcanvas.com here is the link for someone who wishes to look further into that technique.

I painted her underpainting with as much detail as I could muster the only problems that I found were the fact that when I started my drawing I did not work out the composition as well and the shapes by standing at various locations behind the canvas and looking as I was going.

The sizing of many of my proportions was off because of this as when I stood back and looked at the image it was not all right. I also painted her checkard shirt in real detail.