Botticelli's Three Graces - WIP

This is one of my ambitious works! That is for sure...Right now I am in a phase where I want to know what painting technique works best for me. So I started to experiment with different painting methods that I am interested in.
I wanted to do a part of Botticelli's  "La Primavera" and  I choose The Three Graces.

In this post I shall be telling you about my composition and the painting method I followed.
The background of my painting is a collage of two of Raphael's paintings, with the Three Graces.

The background and colours are inspired from the above two paintings.

The method I followed is one interpretation of the Old Master Painting methods and can be found in http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=11073.0 

I have to tell you before hand that I have not followed the steps mentioned in the above link sequentially. I mixed yellow ochre and a tiny bit of black acrylic paints and used that colour to cover the white of the canvas(don't know why I did that!.). But since I had covered my canvas with dark yellow ochre-ish colour, I thought I'll just continue with the steps mentioned in the link.Then I drew the figures and used burnt umber to place the shadow areas. After this I did the scumbling with titanium white. While doing this I also painted the background almost to completion.

Will continue talking more about this in my next post...

Old Master Painting Method

Hi.......

           This post I thought I’ll tell you guys how I paint and since I started the volunteer work at The Wallace Collection I am more determined to learn about eighteenth and nineteenth-century French paintings and their technique. For now I mostly like the Dutch and Flemish method of painting, which is also known as 7 layer method. As the name says it all it’s done with multitude of paint layers (not just 7!!) of transparent oil paints. I learnt this method by reading about Rembrandt, Rubens and other artists of the 17 -18th century. Also I bought DVD lessons from Johnnie Liliedahl (who has some excellent old master reproductions DVD lessons) and Alexei Antonov's video Workshop “Claret Grapes". These video lessons did help me in improving my technique and brush-work and the most importantly in understanding the colour mixing for old master paintings.

Umber final layer

Umber final layer

Dead layer 1

Dead layer - final

Final colour layer

Final colour layer