Finally Finished - "Niece With a Pearl Earring"

I started my "Niece With a Pearl Earring" exactly one year ago, and then got so busy with other projects, it was put on the backburner. When I realized it had been a whole year, I figured it was time to finish it. Sometimes waiting is a good thing. I think seeing the wonderful paintings in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in October inspired me. No matter all the art you can see on the Internet these days, nothing replaces seeing great paintings in real life. (And I didn't even make it over to the National Portrait Gallery!)

If you'd like to see my original blog post, click here. I think I was able to achieve a glow (something I was concerned about after the first go around), but I won't be any so bold as to say it can compare with Vermeer's glow. I did knock out the straight black background with more colors than you can imagine by viewing on the Internet. That was kind of fun. You can learn a lot by painting a study after a master from long ago, but I think this one will be my last for a long time (if I ever do one again). I have too many of my own ideas I want to execute and learn from.

This has been sitting on my shelf for a week now and as I will often do, I like to live with a painting for a few days before I proclaim it officially "done." The only thing I'm trying to decide for this one is whether I will give it an antique glaze to tone down some of the colors and give it more of an "old world" look. Feel free to let me know what YOU think.

(I get a kick out of thinking of her ancestors, long after I'm gone, fighting over who gets to inherit this painting of her).

"Niece With a Pearl Earring"
14"x18" oil on canvas, NFS