[John Zeissig]

One thing that really struck me in doing this exercise was the extreme softness of edges and the exquisite subtlety of small color changes in Vermeer's technique. Unless my reproductions were lying to me, there are truly no hard edges to be found anywhere in the face in the original. This was noted in the original post by Michelle. I was going batty trying to reproduce some of these effects until I tried using some blown out old brushes that I was going to discard.

In working the areas around the eyes or the mouth, for example, I would first try to paint using a "good" brush. If that failed to achieve the desired softness, I would take a "funky" brush of the appropriate size and very lightly blend the area to try to match the reproduction. Toward the end of the painting I was using the "good" brushes only to scumble on small amounts of paint, followed by extensive softening and blending with "funky" brushes. Using the "funky" brushes to directly apply paint did not work out very well. The "funky" brushes had to be kept dry and clean for this to work properly.

I suppose the more experienced painters already know this. I've even done this before, but never near the extent that I did in this painting, so I thought it would be worth mentioning it in this context. By "funky" I mean a brush that has lost its original shape, usually because it was cleaned inadequately so that paint was allowed to harden at the junction of hairs and ferrule. The result is a shape like a three dimensional fan or a thistle bloom. Below is a scan of a "funky" brush that started life as a #2 square-edged sable. The scanner lid compressed the hairs a bit, so it's not as fluffy looking as it normally is, but I think it conveys something of what I mean.