Girl with Pearl Earring -- after Vermeer
 

I'm trying my hand at teaching with a small introductory painting class -- We just finished painting studies of a cropped version of Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'.

Here is Vermeer's and then the in-class demo:

Oil on Canvas Panel, 12x9 inches

Nicely done, Terri. It would be interesting, I think, if you could tell us about some of the steps in your process. (I assume you didn't actually photograph it at stages while you were working.) Toned canvas? Grisaille, and if so what pigment? Establishing values? Etc. Thanks.

Hi John..
This was a project for a small novice painting class, so we started with gridding -- which I don't normally do, but I thought that would help give the students a decent drawing to start from. We are using a very limited palette of Gamblin colors:
* Quinacridone Red,
* Ultramarine Blue,
* Phthalo Green,
* Hansa Yellow Medium, and
* Radiant White
--all transparent, except for the white. The limited colors were mostly because I wanted the students to start to get a feel for the properties of the colors they are working with... how they mix, how the transparency vs. not changes the way the paint looks/feels on the canvas. The phthalo green is there mostly as it is a clean complement to the quinacridone red and makes a deep transparent black (This is essentially the same black/pigments as Gamblin's chromatic black... and I'm also allowing them to use the chromatic black as a time-saver, now that they are comfortable mixing it). This isn't my normal palette, but I'm actually finding it pretty versatile and that it produces pretty nice flesh tones! :)

Because it's for a class, I DID take photos along the way of both my work and the students', though I didn't take a shot of the initial gridding/drawing before any paint. Here's a link to my demo in progress:
http://terrificenec.com/page/class2/demodetail.html

Note: Use the forward/back arrow buttons to see different stages of the painting...

The initial drawing with paint is done in a warm deep brown... a mix of black, with added red and yellow... I don't consider this exactly a 'grissaille'... I'm not sure I really know how to do that... Note that I left the shaded side of the turban fairly light in the initial stage because, I knew that the transparent blue over that warm dark would turn to essentially black and I wanted to keep that dark cooler/blue-er. The scattered darks that are there initially are where I wanted deeper darks to come through the blues. . .

Thanks a lot, Terri. All quite useful information, I think. It was interesting to me that you used a limited palette, because I always do - usually only 5 or 6 pigments, depending on what I'm going for. Your initial stage after the gridding is virtually a grisaille, it seems to me, basically just monotone that establishes grey scale values. For me it's the most important stage along with boxing in and establishing "landmarks." Again, thanks.

Came across this page and realized the link to the demo is broken since I re-organized my website a bit. This one should work :)
http://www.terrificenec.com/page/art...emodetail.html