Watch Out if You're Behind Me

The other day I was at a stoplight when I noticed a woman in the car behind me. She had a round face, round cheeks, very very smooth porcelain looking skin and a tight ponytail (which really accentuated her smooth, makeup free face). She looked either completely bored or lost in thought. She caught my attention because she reminded me of someone that the "old masters" of past art periods would have loved to use as a subject in their paintings. Especially in art periods such as the Renaissance and Baroque, artists like Jan Vermeer, Raphael, Titan, and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few, loved to paint people with full, round, smooth faces, at least some of the time. Because I have taken so many art history classes, been so influenced by these artists of the past, people such as this woman behind me at a traffic light really catch my attention, I really want to draw them. Because I thought following her and begging to take her picture for referrence would be weird, I just tried to keep her image in my head and then used my own face as referrence for this picture. I wanted to create a picture with lots of white and smooth places, for the eyes to really be accentuated, to be the focal point. I'm not sure if I succeeded completely here, but it was a fun experiement and a good one too because I am really excited to try again.