I finished my work on texture at the top of the painting, and I'm happier with the result. It's not so much that I didn't like the style of the other - I think I'll try that more some time - it's that the painting started having two different styles, and that didn't feel right to me. As my son put it after seeing this draft, "That looks more like your other paintings. I liked the other one, but I like this one too." So I decided to take this opportunity, with the painting about halfway done, to compare taking a photo of the work to scanning it in. Because it's a 16 x 20 painting, it takes four scans.  I then have to align the scans, which takes a bit of effort. But here's the result:  And compare that to a photo taken of it:  The photo is more washed out, more dilluted. So the lesson for me here is that unless the painting is simply too large to scan, scanning is worth the effort of assembling the quadrants into a coherent whole. On to the pool and the woman... who happens to be my wife sitting poolside in her parent's backyard, but I'm going to attempt to make her more generic. | 
