Painting...

I really enjoy painting. I feel accomplished after finishing a piece.

Last night I decided to paint something (really someone since I prefer to paint portraits) so I grabbed a canvas and my paints and sat down at the computer to find my subject.

Originally I wanted to paint this picture of a girl/woman drinking coffee and you can only see her eyes peaking over the rim of the cup. I have seen this picture twice, once on pinterest and then at a restaurant where it was part of the wallpaper.

Naturally I looked for it online but couldn't seem to think of the right search keywords to find it.

So then I thought, well dummy, just use one of your own pictures.

I settled on this one, I loved how the shadows enhance the picture once I made it gray scale.

I like to either paint in gray scale or in a warm or cool color scheme but still sticking to a gray scale style.
I have painted only in cool colors (green, blue, purple), warm colors (yellow, orange, red and brown thrown in) and I have also used one color in gray scale fashion (greens only, reds only). In one of my favorite paintings I used a gray scale for the subject's face, clothes and body but used warm color highlights in her otherwise black hair (the girl actually had something similar in real life and I really liked the colors).

So when I started thinking about how I was going to paint this picture I decided I wanted to do a gray scale style but with blues. I did not pick blue because I was depressed or anything like that, I just wanted to use it because I had not in the past. (I take that back, I have done a portrait in blues before but it was a commissioned piece and I stupidly unfortunately forgot to take a picture of it.)