I intended to take several pictures of my progress but with a string of overcast days and the speed at which I painted, I ended up with only one progress shot. The painting was completed in a about 4 days and then spent a few weeks, knit picking and making adjustments bit by bit.
When I first tried to shoot the painting, I noticed a red day-glow effect on Buffy's skin. I've never had one of my paintings color shift so much in changing light and tracked the problem down to a tube of orange paint I used. I've never previously used or owned a tube of orange paint and I never will again. I remedied the problem by painting a glaze over the skin using a light violet mix.
I originally planned on keeping more painterly, but I didn't like the look in the test shots, so I smoothed out the roughness in most areas except for the sun, book, and graveyard. The clouds never came together quite the way I wanted, probably because I couldn't decide if I wanted them looser and stylized or more realistic…a dilemma that would have been easier to experiment with if I were painting it digitally…but still not a bad result in the end.
When it came time for the final photograph, I ended up going to a pro with a DSLR camera and a polarized filter setup. Most photographers don't use (or know about using) polarized filters for shooting artwork but it makes a big difference in eliminating glare. The DSLR Camera the photographer used wasn't quite as high in megapixels as I had expected, so I had him shoot two photos (top and bottom) and I let Photoshop stitch them together, with only minimal need to fix some seams. I made various color, sharpening, and contrast adjustmentsto the file, in order to match the painting. I also did some minimal touch ups to compensate for the inherent roughness that a photo brings to a smooth looking painting.