"Little Girl in a Blue Armchair" by Mary Cassatt, Day 1

Day one on a new copy! My goal for today was simple: bring in my new canvas and get the composition drawn onto it.

Here is a photo of the gallery before I got set up. The easel was not in there, but they brought it to me pretty quickly. You can see my paintbox on the little cart I use to bring my stuff up from the locker room, and also one corner of my canvas. That whole back wall is Mary Cassatt paintings, with the one I'm copying in the very center.

The original painting measures 35 1/4"x51 1/8". I stretched a canvas 27"x39", which is the same proportions. (I use a great Excel spreadsheet that my husband Hal designed for me to compute the size of my copy.)

After I got the canvas stretched and gessoed, I divided it into halves and quarters at home. I printed out the image of the painting from the National Gallery's web site, and I also divided it into halves and quarters by folding it. (You can see the small printout on my paint box in this photo, and if you look closely, you can see the pencil lines on my canvas.) I considered using this little printout to enlarge the composition onto my canvas, but I wasn't sure if the image I got from the web site was the entire painting. If it had been cropped, then simply blowing it up might result in a distorted image. I decided to wait until I was face-to-face with the painting to draw it onto my canvas.

Having my canvas gridded out made the work go much easier, and seeing where the centers were on the little printout made it go much faster. It turned out that the image on the computer had not been cropped, so I could pretty confidently rely on the divisions of the picture plane being the same proportions on the little print and on my canvas. I mixed some raw umber with white, which made a pale beige color. With a brush, I made tiny marks to indicate where important points in the composition hit these divisions, and then I connected the dots. I relied heavily on the shape of the negative space of the floor that is between all the chairs. It is a very specific shape, which I thought looked like a bird facing left (kind of like a cartoony seagull.) Thinking of the shape this way helped me see if I was getting it right. Also, as I got the little girl sketched in, I kept checking against the printout to see if everything was falling within the correct spaces on the grid.

After about an hour and a half, during which time I was blissfully uninterrupted, the drawing was finished, and it was time to stop for lunch. My friend Leigh came to have lunch with me, and I didn't work on the painting any more today. I feel good about the drawing and think it's just about right. If not, I can make adjustments as I go. I'll be back to work on it again in two weeks!

(click the images for a larger view.)