"Guilt" the start

 The first thing I had to do was prepare an "overlay", which is a clear plastic film that has the image of the still life traced onto it. I did that a few days ago and a photo is posted on September 25th. The photo above shows me transferring that overlay to the canvas using a small piece of transfer paper and a stylus (my silverpoint tool which is a silver rod inserted into a mechanical pencil holder). It is very tedious work and bending over that way was not fun for my troubled back. The painting in the background is one that I just finished called "Fixing Supper".

I have moved the canvas to my easel and I'm getting ready to start to draw over the tracing with dark paint. You can see the still life set up in the background. It was very difficult to position myself in exactly the same spot that I was in when I took the original photo. And Miss Puss has some kind of weird affection for the drapery on the floor and she has pulled it all apart and this morning one of them was totally out of the suitcase and pushed almost back to the wall. So photo reference was totally necessary. In the end trying to see those faint tracing marks on the canvas was a challenge. You can barely see them in the photograph above. I finally decided to use my tablet as a reference and installed the original photo in its Gallery, and I could blow it up in pieces to see what I was doing. It was tedious work and after 5 hours I decided I needed to stop.

You can see my progress in this photograph where I was trying to establish a dark line to work against. I felt that I needed the overlay for reference and used clamps to attach it to the top of the canvas so I could flip it up and down whenever I needed a quick reference for something that didn't transfer or lines that I couldn't see. I'll finish the drawing tomorrow.