A Master Copy

A Master Copy

I had an assignment in my life painting class (which is still killing me) to copy a Master painting from the 17th century. I picked a Rubens:

Rubens Isabella

(Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon, c. 1630)

I thought there was a good range of values and colors, although I knew the collar would be tough. Her face is weirdly pale, though it was probably accurate. The first step was to do the drawing and then outline it in black paint. The second step was to tint the background (first layer only), and I had started that when I remembered to take a picture:

Outline of woman

I did this on 18 x 24 inch Gessobord, although I taped off the bottom 3 inches because there was enough of her dress/coat/whatever showing. I had to sort of make up what was going on to the right because I shifted her over to the left too much. I still had to finish tinting the background in an Ivory black wash, so I finished that and then did the heightening with white step:

heightened with white

After that, we had to use the dead color palette technique, which I talked about in my previous blog post. I started with the background and spent hours just on that. Here is what it looked like after my initial attempt at that (I spent so many hours putting down layer after layer of glazes to achieve this):

draft

I know it still needs a ton of work, especially her face, which looks completely flat. I submitted it for feedback from my professor, hoping he’d give me some tips on how to make the face work, and who knows what else. After that, I finished making the tweaks with the dead colors:

The final step was really to use the full color palette to enhance the previous version. But since the main goal of this assignment was to make a copy, I didn’t think I needed any “full colors.” The dead color palette seemed to work really well for this painting. So I just tweaked her face mostly. Here is the final version, the best I could manage: 

final copy

I tried to fix the face, but it got to the point where my efforts were no long improving it. I’m also not a fan of the hair. And her eyebrows should have been done with more detail. But I feel like this indefinitely better than my previous work, but I’m so impatient to just get better already.