I'm told the best way to learn how to paint is to copy the great paintings you've seen. I love this painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau so I gave it a shot - even though I can't pronounce his name properly, here's a glimpse into my oil painting study technique.
I started by gathering as many reference photos of the original painting as I could. As it's such a loved painting, there are many copies, cheap prints and fakes I had to avoid. I can't get to see the original painting because it's currently in a private collection (deposited in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, since September 22, 2022).
I had to do many drawings of the painting to get comfortable with it. Where are the darkest areas? Where is the light? What is understated in the painting but is difficult to do? So many things to think about and practice in pencil and charcoal.
Of course the drawings had to be scaled up onto the canvas. I used Belgian linen mounted on a lightweight aluminium composite board (Dibond) with reversable adhesive. I'll do a post about the benefits of this type of approach and it's long term benefits.
I painted the figures in grisaille; I love this method because it imitates the drawings and as there's no colour yet, they appear more like sculptures - the colour is one less thing to think about at this early stage.
The colour just sits over the grisaille in the figures which makes the accuracy of the underpainting so important - something I could have improved on but I'm not aiming for perfection with this painting, I'm aiming to learn. The background is interesting to paint because there's many levels. There is the darkest part of the painting - the bushes and leaves behind the main figure, the far off mountains in the top right, the light brown earth in the left foreground that helps to give the impression of height to the trees in the top left. Indecently, that back lit tree configuration can be seen in several of Bouguereau's paintings, it works really well.
Obviously I got no where near the standard of the original but I really enjoyed the process, my favourite part? The folds in the white rags followed closely by the leaves in front of the mountains.