Portrait Of Anne 7th Sitting

Another session yesterday. I started by applying some thin glazes on the left side of Anne's face trying to add a bit of depth to the shadow areas. Then I worked into that, using slightly more impasto paint. Last week I was struggling so much in bad lighting conditions that I turned on an electric light to give a bit more ambient light to her right side, and I quite like it so we've decided to keep it. I've added cadmium orange to my palette. It is a strangely cool orange that I've never been able to duplicate using cadmium yellow and red and as a tint with lots of white it makes a good colour for flesh lit by electric light. The same goes for alizarian crimson or rose madder tints. The left side of her face is picking up the natural light from the windows on that side and I'm using terre vert, raw umber, mars violet and ivory black.

I was still not happy about something and I came to the conclusion I had the eyes too close together. Much to Anne's consternation, I made the decision to scrape out her left eye and shift it over a bit. I'm still not certain it was the right thing to do - I'm not very happy with it at all. Growing pains. In fact, this morning I attempted to do some more work on it, relying simply on memory and I fear I have only succeeded in making it worse. Its very frustrating.