Holbein Master Copy -- a new picture in progress

I started this project last fall. It will be a master copy of Holbein's Thomas More, painted to scale. The detail in the velvut cuffs, the fur collar and the stubble in the face are amazing. And learning how to paint them is the challenge I've taken on.

For the first time ever, I made use of an old fashioned "squaring up" technique: I drew a grid over a print that I bought years ago at New York's Frick Gallery and then drew a similar grid over my 24" by 30" canvas.

I've been concentrating on getting the face right and still have some minor adjustments to make to the jaw line. The real challenge though will be colour and I'm going to worry about it later. No two prints I've seen are alike and most that I have make the skin too yellow and the curtain too vibrant a green. Each print also brings out different details in each area, so I'm drawing on more than one version...

Version 1: Downloaded from the Google Art Project and its tour of the Frick Gallery in New York, where this painting hangs.

Version 2: Downloaded from the respected http://www.artrenewal.org/ archive of classical works.

Version 3: Downloaded from an internet picture archive

Brook Trout and Rope

I've left the perch alone for now. The word not the fish. A couple of sessions ago, I repainted "Perch" by first laying down small black boxes to represent where each letter needs to go. After adjusting the vertical and horizontal angles of the sides for each letter, I slowly began carving them out. That seemed to be the more efficient approach. They still need some fine tuning, but I'll do that at the "second painting" stage, which I'm close to beginning.

As you'll see from the image below, I've started blocking out the second set of letters: "Brook Trout". And I've begun to mess more with the rope, warming it up and making it a bit more ragged. The last thing I'll do before starting second painting is to fix the colour of the cork lantern and give the background another dark coat. The next one will be warmer, unlike our spring weather.

The trouble with Perch -- the word, not the fish

While working on smaller areas these last few weeks, my book has begun to sag on the stand. The front corner has actually "wilted" bit, so I've taken time to reshape the right page and need many more coats of white to mask the previous corner.  I've laid out one fish (a perch) on that page and have started giving shape to the one on the opposite page.

Painting words is proving more of a challenge than I imagined. I have to wipe out my first attempt at "P E R C H" and try again, this time using a rule to approximate 2 point perspective and block in the approximate positions of the letters. The vertical sides of the letters need to recede off to the right (and they would merge at some imaginary vanishing point to the upper far right). The horizontal sides of the letters also need to appear to follow an imaginary vanishing point on the left. What this is supposed to mean to me is that the tops of the letters are bigger/fatter than the bottoms of the letters. And the P should be taller than the H. When I stand directly in front of the book, the verticals do seem to line up with the edges of the page. But from my viewpoint 7 feet in front of my still life (looking directly at the corner of the page), the book sags, bending and distorting the edges of the page... What a pain.

I also need to revisit the cork. The right side is too cool. I was trying to follow the rule of painting skin, which is "cool, warm, cool, warm" -- cool highlights, warm in the lights, cool in the halftones, and warm in the lights. But in my last attempt, I mistakenly enlarged the cool half-tones and I need to make them thinner and return the warm darks to the  farthest side.

The background (now sunken in) will also be repainted later in a warmer tone...