I’m feeling a little tired today (didn’t sleep well at all last night, and I have no idea why), but I still managed to spend about 30 minutes this evening on the Manet copy.

I wanted to start with the darkest darks first, so I can judge everything else against that baseline. I used an 8B pencil and a blending stump for the darkest parts of the jacket.

I have a little work to do to fix the face, but I was pretty sure that if I tried that tonight, it would just make things worse. I’ll save that for a night when I’m feeling a bit better.

Based on my progress tonight, I’m guessing I have another 3 ¹⁄₂ to 4 hours of work remaining. I must keep this in mind and not let myself fall into the trap of hurrying through just to get it done. I can almost hear my high school art teacher’s voice in my head: “quality takes time”.