Progress on my face lift

Procrastination set in for a couple of days and I only dribbled and drabbled a bit on the two new canvases for the Privacy Please show.  Today I got down to business and worried for a few minutes about where to start. Painting shadows across the skin is tricky and requires even more concentration and observation than the usual portrait does. I had laid in some plain, fast drying white yesterday to establish the non shadow areas and today tackled everything from the center out, starting with the eyes. I used  alizarin crimson, cad red, indian red, payne's grey, naples yellow, white, and a very small touch of burnt umber for skin tones, both in light and shadow, just different intensities and values. I should use a limited palatte more often - it is fun to watch all the colours you can come up with. For the eyes I used payne's grey, viridian, yellow ochre and naples yellow.

I'm thinking of softening and blurring as I work out toward the edges of the canvas concentrating more focus on the face.

Meanwhile I am reading all this stuff about the bad shape the world is in and get back to wondering for the umpteenth time why I get so concerned about how the painting is going when so much is falling apart. Is is fear mongering going on out there, or is it really something we should all be paying attention to? I get tired of never knowing what to believe. Maybe that's why I, and many of you, stick with the art problems - at least we can have some control over that and it is something one CAN believe in.