Another digital camera image, showing the finished copy of Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring", and one of the reproductions (also digitally photographed) that I used as a reference to paint from. In my opinion this site would have been much improved in terms of the color quality had I been able to photograph all of the images with a digital camera, and not had to rely on scanned 35mm slides, as their color qualities have been a disappointment.

Of course, the whole point of doing a copy is to learn principles that you can then put to use in your own oil paintings. This oil portrait of my friend Kerri was done using the same approach illustrated in this article -- a highly finished black and white underpainting was executed, and then colored by adding successive layers of glazes, with the light areas conveying a luminousity.

This copy I did of Edgar Degas' "Portrait of a Young Woman" was done using an entirely different approach -- the use of opaque brushwork applied directly to a white canvas. The effect is one that is solid and sculptural. In the future I hope to add some pages illustrating this approach.

This is a detail of one of the first Vermeer paintings that I copied as a learning exercise when I was in school. His "Writing Lady in Yellow Jacket". It was also done over a grisaille underpainting. I had gone to see the original when it was being exhibited at the De Young Museum in San Francisco, around 1990.