A New Start! "The Cradle - Camille with the Artist's Son Jean"

This is the painting I am copying now: "The Cradle - Camille with the Artist's Son Jean"

I went in with a clean, white, freshly stretched canvas. Quite large - the original painting measures 45 3/4" x 34 15/16". We are restricted to no larger than 40" in our copies, so I started plugging in numbers to the "painting resizer" Excel spreadsheet that my husband, Hal, made for me to ensure that my reduced-size copy is as close as possible to the proportions of the original, to the nearest whole inch (commercial stretcher bars only come in whole inches, and although I stretch my own canvases, I'm not fanatical enough to make my own stretchers!) 

Using the spreadsheet, I came up with a size of 38" x 29", which the local art supply store, Plaza, happily had in stock. So over the weekend I stretched the canvas, and finished the three coats of gesso and one coat of polymer matte medium (to seal the gesso) late last night. 

Since I finished it so late, I didn't have time to mark the centers of the sides of the canvas, and had to measure it by eye in the museum. I certainly make things hard for myself! But it was a great learning experience - by carefully analyzing the painting, I saw that the vertical center line goes right down the edge of the strong vertical shadow in the cradle's drapery, and passes through the baby's face. The horizontal center goes from Camille's shoulder, through her chin, and across to the top edge of the dark brown horizontal shape on the left. I further subdivided the grid on my canvas into quarters (just the lower half) and further into eighths. Then I carefully drew in (with thin gray paint) all the major shapes of the painting. I also had an "aha" moment - up until today, I didn't really understand the space in the painting - I thought it was a kind of ambiguous space, with the diagonal of drapery and yellow and dark brown area on the left not making much sense to me. Then suddenly I realized that it is a bed on the left, with a yellow blanket, and a wooden footboard, and curtains coming in from the upper left corner that hang around the bed. The back wall in the painting must be draperies over windows, and the cradle has its own curtain that can be drawn around it when the baby is sleeping.

Here is the drawing after two solid hours of measuring, painting, rubbing out, and redrawing:

After lunch, I continued correcting the drawing, and finally started painting colors in. This is the fun part! I was glad I had spent so much time working on the drawing because now I can concentrate on channeling Monet's mark-making.

Here is a shocking confession: back when I was in middle school, other kids used to get me to forge their parent's names on absentee passes after they skipped school! Copying this painting strongly reminded me of that - using carefully pre-mixed colors, I just zoned out and tried to make the marks that he did (his "handwriting"). This is just a start - next week, I will mix a lot more paint, and try to cover much more ground.