Roses continued

Second session, my setup. This is how far I got after 8 hours total:

I'm taking pains to get the drawing right, especially since I've changed the proportions slightly. Using gridlines as a guide when drawing, allows those adjustments to made accurately across the whole surface. I've been reading a lot about how Vincent worked. That background color was applied in a thin layer at first, then the thick ribbons of  diagonal texture were some of the last strokes he added. He used dark blue to lay in the drawing, and those lines remain very visible and an important part of the composition.

Session 3, I'm starting on the leaves and flowers.

This is one of very few Van Gogh's to show revisions. Normally he painted very quickly with few revisions or corrections. Here, he added roses to the bottom of the vase and a sprig at left to correspond to one of the accompanying paintings. If you haven't watched the Met video yet, it's truly worth 8 minutes of time to understand so much more about this series of flowers.

The color issue: He used geranium lake, along with red lead in other paintings possibly because he knew that the lakes were fugitive but letters to Theo for needed supplies specify tubes of geranium lake for these paintings. His strategy, described in his letters, was to overload the color to compensate for future fading, but he couldn't have known they would fade all the way to white.

It's hard to know how much pink to put back. We have some photos from the 1920's and 30's but how reliable can those be? Color reproduction was dismal then, but we do know for certain that these roses were originally mostly pink: