Girl with a Pearl – Studying from the Masters

Ruskin said something like “You haven’t really seen a thing until you have drawn it”.  Very true. I sometimes do sketches from the masters. Here is my sketch from Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earing.  No originality here on my part, but doing an accurate sketch of this sort of subject brings one to learn and understand much more deeply than merely viewing the image. You notice a lot more, such as the overall structure, the skew in the lips, the eye covered partly by the nose, the graphic of the eyes, the modeling of the eye socket bone,  the subtlety of the eyebrows, the open spaces between the marks. I don’t mind saying it took quite a while to get it this far – but worth it as a learning exercise.