The final touches on the painting came in the small details - things such as the the rigging of the aircraft, the paterning of the landscape below, a fatal wound in Wolff's chest (which may or may not be historically accurate, but I thought it communicated the story well).
Altogether, I spent 9 months working on Wolff's Requiem. Progress during the early stages (i.e. the research, the perspective drawings, the preliminary studies, etc.) was was gradual at first, as I was also working on other projects at the same time. However, by the time I reached the actual painting stage my attention was devoted entirely to this project . Even with my full attention, the actual painting of Wolff's Requiem took 2 months. With smaller paintings I can usually add a layer of paint where needed and then set the painting aside to dry a bit while I work on other projects. Wolff's Requiem is a fairly large painting - 44 inches by 28.5 inches - and as it turned out, I would paint a layer in one area and then move on to another, and by the time I was finished with that area, the previous spot would be dry enough to add more paint. I was painting continuously on Wolff's Requiem for almost the entire 2 months. It was painting marathon!
Although my intent at the outset was to paint Wolff's Requiem as a glaze painting, the truth is that it is probably only a glaze painting in a loose sense of the term. I did experiment with layering colors to achieve a desired effect, but I did not feel that it would be wise to get too radical with my experiments and risk ruining the painting, so in some areas I fell back on the techniques that I was already familiar with and layered with colors that I mixed on the palette. Overall, however, I was very pleased with my results, and I achieved the deeper, richer colors that I was hoping for.
As a final note - in a true case of serendipity, I realized a week after I had finished the painting that I had applied the last brushstrokes (the bullet holes in the triplane) on September 15, 2007 - 90 years to the day after Wolff's death!



 
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