Black Leather Shoes--Finished

9 x 12 oil on stretched canvas

I found some time this evening after I put the kids in bed to finish this picture of my wife's shoes.  I surprised myself and was able to finish this in about one three-hour sitting (If you look at the first post on the bottom of this page you can see the earlier, unfinished version of the shoes.  

I started by going back and adding some more black to the shoes.  I really wanted to make the curve of the shoes stand out more, especially the shoe in the back.  From there I added the inside of the back shoe using ivory black, zinc white, and raw umber.  I mixed the white and black to get a silvery gray and then added the brown to get the right tone.  For the insides of both shoes I started with the darkest shadow areas and painted toward the light, just adding white to lighten the value.  

Once the shoes were complete, I added the background. I varied my technique a bit about halfway through.  I started on the right side by coating that area of the canvas with a thin layer of white.  I then added black and blended it out to show the shadows in the cloth. I found that using that method I had a lot of trouble controlling the paint.  Therefore, for the rest of the background I switched back to my normal technique of directly painting each section starting with the darkest area and moving toward the light.  This allowed me to use the white of the canvas to (try) to show the folds of the cloth.  Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy the painting.