Starting the Dry Brush for Hermes

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been busy making preparations for Hermes. After the cartoon was finished, I coated 2 available stretched canvases (one actually canvas and the other linen) with 3 coats of Golden Ground & Gesso and sanded after the last coat with 600 wet/dry silicon carbide sandpaper. I decided to work with the canvas because it's slightly wider than the linen, at 20X24 instead of 18X24.

The next step was to transfer the cartoon onto the canvas. I tried putting a sheet of carbon paper underneath the cartoon but the carbon wasn't transferring well and I feared slashing the canvas with the pencil tip if I pressed too hard... So then I resorted to the old fashioned way:
I made a tracing of the cartoon on mylar paper. Then I used a push pin to retrace Hermes on the mylar paper, poking holes large enough so that grains of charcoal would fall through. Once I place the mylar paper over the canvas, I brushed charcoal dust over it to transfer the drawing to the canvas.

The advantages:
-- I still have the original drawing that I can reuse
-- In the later stages of the painting, if I feel I've lost the "drawing", I can place the mylar paper over top again and see how the painting compares with the lines and shapes from the original drawing.

Then came the dry brush. I thinned out Raw Umber and followed the transferred drawing.

Shown below: the canvas with the transferred drawing, gone over roughly dry brush; and below it the completed cartoon and the mylar coated in charcoal.

Now that this is done, I will be able to paint in the "dead colour" --the background, cast shadows, contained shadows -- before beginning big form modelling in the first painting.