I had a friend ask what my process looks like. I was thinking that I was sharing that since I post at each stopping point along the way. But today I realized that I've only been sharing the stopping points, and not the points in between. So here is what I call the paint-by-number stage. I spent years watching Bob Ross paint happy little trees that just magically appeared on the canvas. When I started painting I thought it would be like that. While I still have fond memories of watching those happy little trees, there is a big disservice to the art business in those shows. It just doesn't happen like that. I could spend an entire post explain all the reasons why, but I'll move on. Every artist has their own approach. For me, I find the lights and the darks and lay them in all around the figure. Sometimes it's only in a single area, like the lips. Other times it's a bigger area like here, the entire face. And then I blend it to a soft stage like this...

And then I do it again and again. I call this layering. Each time I repeat the process I see lights I didn't see before. I see darks that are darker. I see shapes that are not quite right. So I paint by number again and soften again until suddenly, there she is. So tune in again tomorrow and we'll see if we got there!