Beauty with a Veil II

This morning I got off to an early start since it's my last day in the studio before school starts.  I was excited to get a lot done.  Last night I finished gridding Beauty with a Veil onto a 40"x60" canvas so that I could get going right away today.  The first thing I did was mix paint.  For a canvas this size, with this variety of colors, that takes about 1 1/2 hours.  I painted the background before lunch so that I could get a sense of the figure in the ground. 

After lunch I started adding colors to the body itself while listening to a Fresh Air podcast about a book called The Happy Marriage.  It was a lovely podcast about a guy who wrote a novel based on his experience as his wife died of cancer.  He didn't want to write a memoir so he could fictionalize parts of it, but it sounds like it went true to life for the most part.  I tried to get it from the library, but it isn't in right now.  I'm looking forward to reading it.  It's so rare to read about good marriages.  It'll be nice to read his take on it, even though there's the horror of his wife's death at the end.

The painting looks nothing like it will when it's finished, but this gives me a good foundation for glazing colors over it and for establishing the tulle fabric as well as the form of her body.  I should have some time Friday to work on it more before going to Fredericksburg for the art opening at the Center for the Creative Arts where I have Beauty with a Veil I.