Painting "Woman With Hat"

​This is an 11×14 acrylic on a Belgian Linen canvas.

​I painted the background ultramarine blue in three layers  and used a white charcoal pencil to sketch the woman.

​To paint her skin, I mixed burnt umber with cadmium red deep and a little bit of cadmium orange. I applied this color in light layers, thinned with matte medium, dampening my brush as I went to thin out the paint. To paint the highlights, I mixed zinc white into my initial color, but I decided it needed to be more grey, so I mixed Mars black into the zinc white that was already on my palette, thinned it with matte medium, and applied this in two layers onto these lighter areas. For the shadows on her face, I darkened my original color with mars black and applied where it was needed. I darkened this color with even more black and applied it where the darkest shadows were, such as along her forehead and around her left eye. I went over both of these with sheer grey, putting some in the center and blending it out with a mop brush. I put touches of grey on the upper lip, around the nose, and around the jawline, softening the edges with a small mop brush.

​For her upper lip, I mixed some of my medium darker skin tone color into some quinacridone red and applied a few layers of this just where the top lip met the bottom lip. I added this color to some zinc white and painted the first two thirds of her bottom lip. I mixed even more of the pinkish skin tone color into the zinc white and painted the middle of the lip, leaving the lightest pink on top, and the brown on the very bottom. After all this, I decided the color wasn’t bright enough, so I tinted straight quinacridone red, thinned with matte medium, all over the pink part of the lip.

​I painted her irises using burnt umber, but I decided the left eye should actually be darker than the right eye, because it’s in shadow, so I painted it van dyke brown. I decided this wasn’t going to work, though, so I eventually tinted that iris with mars black. I used mars black to paint the pupils as always. I painted a strip of sheer grey along the outer third of the pupil of the right eye. I painted her corneas using a grey made by mixing ivory black and titanium white in varying shades, making the cornea of the left eye much darker than that of the right.

I added more shadows to the cornea of her right eye, using darker grey. I put a rim of very dark grey all the way around her right eye, and a rim of black around her left eye. I mixed van dyke brown into my black and painted her eyebrows, drawing slightly curved lines starting at the outer corner and working in, than thickening the line a little bit

​To paint her hat, I used various shades of grey made by mixing zinc white and ivory black. I used the darkest shades for the underside of the brim and the hat’s seam. I used a large filbert brush for most of the body of the hat and a small round brush to paint on slightly darker shadows.

​To paint her hair, I used mars black and glazed over it with two layers of very thinned out ultramarine blue, thinned with matte medium, and buffed out with a mop brush.

​For her blouse and earrings, I used different shades of grey made by mixing titanium white and ivory black.

​Lastly, I painted a dark blue shadow around the right side of her.