Sketch - the start.

Here is the start of the painting.

The surface is a 36x36 inch, smooth Russian Linen.  I started the drawing sort of loose with vine charcoal.  I plan on making many changes so I didn't mind jumping in and starting the composition without too much forethought.  I painted a similar painting last summer as an 18x24 and I expect this one to be very different.  

Here is a shot of the reference I am using.

I purposely chose a bad photo to work from, it is small, black & white and grainy.  I want to use my imagination to work on this painting and don't want to be a slave to my reference.  I will probably paint most of the painting without the photograph once I get it going.  Since this is an experiment, it wasn't really important how I started or how accurate my drawing was.  It obviously isn't a very accurate drawing but it is enough to get me going.  

p.s. I won't be writing this much with every post...most will be just an image upload and a brief description.