The Schoneberg Mona Lisa

Well, here's the old girl, pretty much finished minus the browned varnish layer she'll get once dry. The last weeks have been spent detailing and matching up Mona's face and hands. I settled on a technique of using a smallish (1/8") round brush and laying in barely tinted layers of highlights and shadows with cross hatching-styled strokes. I was inspired to try this by a cartoon Leonardo left of the infant John the Baptist from his Virgin of the Rocks altarpiece, which shows Leonardo's typical style of using very light crosshatching to define forms. It is a technique that yields much control over placement and density of shadows while keeping the paint layer thin and flat for subsequent layers of color. It seemed like something Leonardo may have done.