More of that fairly smooth sailing -- and a little auto-pilot, as I didn't do nearly as a good a job taking progress shots. my process here is more of the same though, working back to foreground on the torso, same approach to values. amazingly, I'm sticking with my light background idea, and adding in little swatches of background with each adjacent body part, allowing me to play with the edges with wet on wet paint.

Now that the first pass on the face is done, the rest of the body is generally smooth sailing. I'll approach the body shape by shape, as if each area created by the sketch is a separate little painting. As I've said in the past, there are probably some huge advantages to working on the entire painting at the same time, slowly bringing all the elements toward the final product together,

Lately I start all of my paintings the same way: a light sketch/line drawing in pencil, then a wash to tint the canvas. In this case, I'm covering only the figure loosely since I don't have my mind made up as to how I want the background. This [at left] is a mix of cad red and burnt umber I believe, cut with lots of Gamsol . I've experimented with a bunch of warm/dark color combinations for this initial wash, but it hasn't made much difference. anything darkish reddish brownish seems to work fine for me.

The idea of documenting the process and my thoughts on a painting from start to finish initially sounds exhausting, and as usual, I'm always wary of providing too much information. Not that I have some top secret painting techniques or anything, but more that it generally feels a little more personal than just posting a finished piece and allowing people to process it their own way.