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Hello Marina - well, that's just marvelous. The trompe-l'oeil is a very clever idea and works beautifully in this one, but the drawing and the painting of flesh is what I really, really like. The subtle changes in brightness of the white from the near shoulder to the far one, and from the chest to the belly and also to the head. And the use of blue in the light areas and orange in the shadows. And the marvelous foreshortening on the near arm - thrilling.
I had an idea when viewing my son's pictures in his viewfinder (the thing you look through and see two images of the the same picture but each one from a slightly different angle for each eye - so you see the picture in binocular three-dimensionality). As I saw the pictures binocularly I was really urged to paint the shadows and light, but, funnily enough, when I closed one eye I lost that urge to paint them. I was convinced that that is what painting realism was about - to paint reality seen binocularly, i.e with either side of a 3-d object seen from a different eye and subsequently a slightly different angle.
You have that in this picture, and that's what makes it thrilling. I presume you painted it from a photo and so have been extra good at creating a binocular reality because you've had to use your instinct and imagination to bring in what photos lack. There's a sense of movement when you create this binocular reality, and you have that here. The child's arm seems to be shifting slightly up and down and back and forth. Lovely, wonderful. You deserve a stream of first prizes!
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