Based on Renoir's "Girls at the Piano"

This painting could certainly use more work, but then it seems the more I do the worse it gets. It was pretty good at the first brush stroke. It would be quite effective to drawn in all the shading and creases of the dress, then use a transparent glaze for the dress. I did this and it looked good, but not enough detail. Then I used two shades of the light purple for the dress and that too looked good, but with less detail. Then I added grey paint and glaze, and white paint and various renditions of those. The blue snuck in inadvertently, it was hiding in the white.

This painting is one of a series done by Renoir with the same subject, indeed I think the same girls. They were painted in the 1889 - 1892 time frame, I'm not sure exactly which year, after the Expressionist movement had fallen apart. Renoir was going for Beauty and he, at least, got it.

This is the first time I've used medium. In this case it was matt medium, it is pure acrylic and allows dilution of the color, better brushwork, although it was still too thick at times, and good glazing. At times the glaze paint although colored, barely covered the original coat. The matt medium dries with a semi-gloss finish. My first paintings dried very flat and chalky. It may have been due to the quality of the paint, but also probably due to diluting with water.

I'm intrigued by mediums and glazing. Part of the mystique of oil paints is their transparency. Titian is said to have put on as many as 30 glazes of thin transparent paint, resulting in wonderful effects that I can only guess at, but presumably translucency and depth among them. Acrylics would allow you to do something similar in days instead of months. Mediums also allow you to get watercolor effects, but with complete control of the flow of color and with permanence when it dries.