The next thing we had to do for our Advanced painting class was to do a copy of a Master Painting. I chose Miranda from “The Tempest” painted by John William Waterhouse.

I chose this painting because I thought I needed to practice putting my subjects firmly in a background. Most of my paintings are portraits, not complete paintings with a foreground, middle ground, and a background. The first thing I did was to crop the painting because I only had three weeks to complete it.

Here’s a picture of my cropped image and the beginning of my underpainting. The finished size will be 12 x 16.

Here it is much further along.

Here’s my final. It needed a lot more work and this was what I could finish in three weeks. I learned a lot. You can absolutely learn to paint like another artist. I spent a lot of time figuring out how Waterhouse created his brush strokes, how he layered paint to get effects or certain colors. I figured out that he drew/painted the figure without the dress first, I could tell by the shape of the legs under the skirts. A lot of what he paints is very loose, and that is difficult to copy. This needed probably about another 15 hours for me to be happy with it. It turned out to be a great learning experience.