Portrait Marathon: Hubble begins

Hubble is starting to look back at me, here.  Actually, he appears to be staring rather hard with his right eye (on our left)!  That will have to be adjusted.

I started this one a little differently. I laid down some color washes first; the background (and sides of the deep canvas), and the lilac and deep blue skin tones.  I usually start with establishing the tones - the darks and lights - in detail.  Like a black and white painting over which I then glaze in color and details.  I'm actually unclear, yet, how I'm going to get his frilly white hairs in, especially in the background, which is going to be very dark.  That will be a challenge!  Maybe I'll try a resist ... or not.  Hmmm. Better figure it out pretty soon.

While I was painting, thinking ahead, wondering and worrying about those white tendrils to come, my husband walked in and exclaimed, "Cute!  Very nice!"  That made me feel a little better!  I stepped back and sure enough, there's his little face starting to look right!  Good.  So I figured we were ready to go public with the first stages here.

Now, what to do about those white hairs and the background????
Some of you might be thinking, "What's so hard?  Just paint them back in, in white, right?"  Well, in theory, but this white acrylic paint is not all that opaque, so painting over a dark background may not really do justice to this powder puff.  May have to experiment a bit.  I have one idea that might work ....