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Here's my version of The Tradeswoman at Tea (also translated as The Merchant's Wife, the classic Russian painting by Boris Kustodiev from 1819.



There's a nice description and a bit of background on the original painting from the State Russian Museum over on this blog.



And cartoonist and comics professor Lynda Barry has written an excellent essay on why copying artwork is such a good way of studying it. I agree, I don't feel I've really seen a piece properly until I've drawn it myself, learning all the different parts of it and wondering why the artist had a certain line ending in a certain place or admiring a positioning of colour to make something in the painting appear to leap forward. Read the whole essay on Lynda's blog.

Here's my take on today's #PortraitChallenge, a painting by Ilya Repin from around 1870, owned by one of my all-time favourite museums, the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg. (I like it even better than the Hermitage, even though the Hermitage is more grand.) Here's Repin's original:



I tried to draw it quickly in brown felt-tip marker for a change, then added some colour in Photoshop. Check out other people's drawings over at @StudioTeaBreak on Twitter!

Here's my watercolour version of today's #PortraitChallenge. It's a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens and I discovered it first on the @medievalpoc account on Twitter. You can find out more about it on the Museum of Fine Arts Boston website.



And the pencil lines, before I coloured them in. Check out the other drawings over at @StudioTeaBreak, they're fab! :)

Here's my drawing for today's @StudioTeaBreak #PortraitChallenge! I took a bit of liberty with her nose; I didn't want it to look like an exact copy of the photo.



Here's the original, a platinum print photo by George Charles Beresford from 1902, at the National Portrait Gallery. See other people's drawings over here on Twitter!

Here's our #PortraitChallenge drawings from last Thursday! This time we were riffing on a 1801 woodblock print by Japanese master Utamaro. I played around, drawing mine without looking at the paper. (Can you spot the messy one?) :)




You can see more over at @StudioTeaBreak.

Author Terry McMillan will be reading at the Seattle Public Library on Monday. 

Here's a drawing of the talented lady who makes a lot of my dresses, Esther Marfo.

Thanks to everyone who took part in Thursday's #PortraitChallenge, over on @StudioTeaBreak! Click on the links to see if any more pop up, and here's more information about painter Otto Dix and his 1926 subject, journalist Sylvia von Harden (whose painting self has a brief cameo in the opening of the film Cabaret).




(Here was mine, a bit larger):