Challenge 50 - Teach us About Your Painting Style

This challenge is very important for two reasons.

The first one is, with your very generous help, PADT blog has been happily existing and supporting art for more than 5 years. Can you believe it? To me it feels like I had posted the first challenge just a few months ago. Thank you so much for being PADT's blood and soul and keeping it alive & supporting its mission for all these years.
I can't be more proud of all of you and more grateful for all your help and support over the years. Thank you very much!

The second reason is, this is our 50th challenge. It is a special anniversary, and it calls to be specially marked.

I was thinking what would be interesting and important for all of us to grow as artists, and how this new challenge can help even more. Needless to say, words such as Learning and Education were first and foremost coming to my mind. And that is how the idea for the new slightly more demanding challenge and composition was born.

About the challenge and composition

In this challenge I am kindly asking you to write your post and teach us how you made your painting. I would like you to teach all of us about your painting style and important components (process, thoughts, ideas, challenges, ...) you think the others will learn and benefit from. I remember the saying one of my university teachers was frequently repeating "The one knows the subject only if she/he can teach the others."

Here is how we will together accomplish it. You will paint the challenge and take pictures as you progress. At the end please send me maximum 5 pictures of your painting in different stages (Let's name them Picture1, Picture2, Picture3, Picture4, Picture5).

For each of the pictures please kindly provide a short paragraph describing the stage you are in, why you did it that way so far, and what did and did not work as you imagined. Each paragraph should be named (Paragraph1 (accompanying Picture1), Paragraph2 (accompanying Picture2),  etc.).

For the challenge, I have chosen a moderately complex subject that has well defined light and shadow areas. As in the Old Master's paintings it has ~80% dark values and ~20% light values, which allows the focus to glow and stand out even more.

You are free to modify the composition as you like and tell us why and how you did it.

Please send your paintings by Jan 11, 2015. The next challenge will be posted on Jan 12,  2015. 

Best regards and Happy Painting!
Lela