The Riders, Day 2

Today I started by painting in the sky. I had toned the whole canvas yellow, which turned out to be the wrong color. It's actually got a more orange underpainting. And I shouldn't have included the sky, but that's OK, because today I painted the sky in and it covered the underpainting. Then I started working my way down the landscape. The museum was pretty full today, and a lot of people wanted to talk to me, asking me things like, can anybody just come in here and paint? So I got to educate a lot of people about how to become a Copyist. And everyone was so complimentary, it makes up for the fact that you get interrupted a lot.

I had gotten an early start, took the Metro, and arrived at the museum just as the doors were opening. My initial block-in last week was pretty accurate (how did that happen?) but I found plenty of corrections to make when I got down to the jockeys. My canvas is slightly less wide in proportion to its height than the original, so things don't really work out the same way, especially in that clump of horses, riders and negative space, but I guess it's good enough. I love how the horses blend in with each other - Degas didn't bother defining everything. It's a very gestural painting, it really has a feeling of motion. I stopped as soon as I started feeling tired, which was about 3:00. I think this copy might be done in another couple of weeks. 

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