The face is much improved thanks to a solid day of focused work, although the ear still needs to be fixed up. I spent a lot of time around the mouth and eye, re-shaping the contours of the shadows to make them more accurate and to blend out some of the edges that I felt were too strong.

I hummed and hah’ed about painting the red hair against the red dress before committing to it because I felt a little nervous about having too much of these similar colours.Now it’s done I think they are different enough to each other to be comfortable and I like it. Once the glaze of Iron Oxide went over her hair I let some of it blend into the skin of her temple and the back of her neck. I added a white lace trim to the colour which I will glaze with a bit of a yellow to make it similar to the fabric around her stomach.

It’s time to work on the arms and hands.

  This sounds crazy, but I’ve spent a long time painting the red dress red again with the Red Ochre, deepening the colour and adding and blending some blues into the shadows. I added a little Raw Umber into the Ochre and used it to emphasize edges, especially around the hem of the dress. A few areas of shadow got a touch of this deep red as well. I painted the white fabric around her middle with a nice cream, mixing three combinations of Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and Foundation White to create a mixture of yellows and white hues, then used Yellow Ochre on its own to line the edges and produce a deep but fine shadow.

Continuing our conversations about studio tools, Mike brought over a very interesting lens that his grandfather used to use in his work. I liked it so much that I asked Steve Aufhauser at Continental to get one for me. It’s a reducing lens, making everything look smaller than it actually is, which is useful if you don’t have the space to walk away from your work to see how it’s looking at a little distance from where you sit. It’s also great if you feel a bit lazy and don’t want to keep walking back and forth, especially when you get to the later stages of the painting when you want to look at the piece quite a lot for fine tuning. Because it looks exactly like a magnifying glass it’s quite good fun to hand it to an unsuspecting visitor without telling them what it is, so you can enjoy their surprise when they realize that the world has turned tiny.

My student Joseph is working on his project to investigate Pre-Raphaelite wet-white painting technique. It’s going well, and he’s made some interesting observations along the way.  Check out his blog and see what he’s been up to.

It was a dramatic day of change for the Queen painting in the studio today as I added Red Ochre to the dress. I left the grey version of the dress alone to dry for a couple of days to make sure that the glaze would do no damage to the grisaille layer, then today I pounced the Red Ochre over the grey with a brand new, clean, soft rag to make it even and thin, so that the darker greys of the grisaille deepen the colour of the new layer, creating the shadows in the folds of the cloth.

While I was waiting for the dress to get completely dry I worked on the face, building a grey version that will take the velatura layer properly. I’m not entirely satisfied with it yet, but because the face is pretty small it’s hard to get everything just so in one go, and I didn’t want to risk messing up the good bits, so I’ll let this layer dry thoroughly then continue with it on Monday, correcting errors and finding highlights and shadows more effectively. The beauty of oil paint is that it can be added to in layers so nicely, allowing for correction and reworking.

Finally, I worked on the marble floor, first blending lozenge shaped Cobalt Blue veins into a layer of Foundation White with one of my smallest fan brushes, letting it dry then adding a very thin glaze of Iron Oxide Red into the cracks of the marble to stain the joins. Next a 00 Silver striping brush was used to make very thin lines of the Iron Oxide to show where the cracks are at their deepest. Tomorrow I’ll repaint areas within the lozenges with Ceramic White, then add a glaze of white with a touch of yellow in it along the wall to imitate reflected light from the wainscot.