#4 of four

Our goal with this one was to leave as much of the background exposed as possible, and to be minimal with the rest. I had some trouble with that, because part of Emma's was predicated on its being painted over the least busy and lightest of her four backgrounds, while mine had a lot of darkness through the middle and bottom. So the face is much more "worked" than was desirable. 

She didn't want us to do the long straight hair of the model, but my background coincidentally had almost the exact divisions and lines that followed the track of her hair, so I went ahead and did it. I'm happy with the bit of serendipity that made my background look almost landscape-like behind her head—a vaguely Russian Mona Lisa! (because of her fantastic long, almond-shaped eyes and cheekbones).

As with the last one, we considered what was left on our palette when making our final plans, and used that on our brayer to "back off" parts of the picture. I had the blue from the previous portrait, so I mixed it with some of the white and rolled it down her left side, and then filled in a white portion above her opposite shoulder with red to complete the illusion of a backing landscape.

I probably could have messed with this for another half hour (and no doubt made it worse), but I touched up the features one more time so they popped out of the softened part and called it a day. It's a little too pink and white, and I thought about introducing some raw sienna somewhere, but decided to stop while I'm ahead. I don't know if it strictly achieves what Emma was going for, but the tension I feel when I look at it assures me that I took a risk!

"Russian Mona"—charcoal, acrylic paints, and Stabilo All marking pencil on Fluid 140-lb. coldpress watercolor paper, approx. 9x12 inches.