Distance in Portraiture

At work on a full-length portrait in Palazzo Corsini

I’m currently working on one of the larger portraits I’ve ever painted. I also have very little time to do it as the sitter is about to have a baby. Luckily the room where I’m working is the largest room I’ve ever had to do a portrait commission in, and it is so much easier to paint fast when you have this amount of distance to see the model from.

Here is a quick time lapse film of the first four days. A last minute idea using my cellphone camera, so the quality is not the best. The jumps in progress are because the battery kept dying…