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The color was pretty darn close, but I still tweaked it a bunch. I never copy color exactly. I try to enhance the effects I see as relating to the scene I'm creating. If you would compare the complexion of a Bouguereau painting to a real person his color looks wrong. But in the context of his paintings it's so incredibly lifelike.
For whatever reason I cannot for the life of me reproduce the subtle color changes I paint when I shoot my work, so what you're seeing here is missing a lot of nuance.
I used the Alkyd primed Claessens (is this the right spelling). It has a little more tooth than the DP13 and I like the way it grabs the paint. I have still not found my perfect canvas so I'm always trying different ones. This is the canvas I use for my demos and when doing alla prima (one shot) portraits.
This portrait was actually commissioned as an alla prima painting but was not done from life due to her age. When I finished the alla prima stage I felt that I wanted to keep refining her face and just I kept painting for another couple of days. Thus was born my new genre...The Portrait Vignette, which combines elements of both my finished and more spontaneous approaches.
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