I've moved my easel and paints to the kitchen. There are several advantages to this: the lighting is spectacular; it's warm all the time and I don't need to start a fire and wait for everything to warm up; I see the painting all the time, so it's on my mind.

I'm working on a vertical 24- by 36-inch painting of my friend Jenifer VanPelt's little girl Emilia. She's four and takes that very seriously. It came about that I was on a photo shoot for one of our magazines that the paper puts out. It was our spring issue and we were doing maple recipes and Ken Williams was doing the photos. Ken enchants everyone he meets and Emila was no exception. She was walking around with her toys in her arms, half naked dolls, with and without hair and a little pink teddybear. I asked Ken to take some photos of her, straight on, full figure. I'm not usually a big proponent of painting from photos, but especially with kids, it's almost a necessity. I printed out the photos and got started in early summer. By August, I was going into surgery for my back so I didn't get much done until October. And now I've just started in again.

I worked on her sleeve and the front of her sweatshirt, all in turquoise. I had to look up the color mix from my notes. I don't give exact measurements, so there is always a little experimentation going on in order to match a painted section. (I used a combination of Rembrandt Pthalo Turquoise Blue, Williamson King's Blue, Windsor Newton Indigo, and for tints and shades, W.N. Titanium White and Rembrandt VanDyke Brown.) 

Another cool thing about painting in my kitchen is that I'm apt to glance over at it as I did this morning over coffee and noticed that I had forgotten to flatten the surface. Although the King's Blue dries fast (and also everything mixed into it), the surface was still damp enough to pull a fan brush over lightly to knock down the surface disturbance without marring the image.

I never used to pay attention to that sort of thing. But it's important, especially in a highly realistic representation. I learned that from all those years with James Aponovich. It's called getting rid of the distractions.