Sometimes a painting feels incredibly quiet.
Which is funny when you learn about the life of the painter.

One of my favorite painters is Johannes Vermeer. He lived in the 17th century in the Netherlands, in a small town called Delft. Vermeer and his wife lived in a large house, and together they had fifteen children.

Fifteen!

You would imagine a house with that many children to be noisy and busy.

But Vermeer’s paintings feel completely different.

He painted in a small room on the second floor of his house. When I look at the paintings he painted there, the atmosphere feels incredibly still. Sometimes I imagine him sitting in that room, painting quietly, almost like he had stepped into a different world for a little while.

You’ve probably seen Girl with a Pearl Earring before.

I remember the first time I saw the painting. I instantly got caught in her gaze and couldn’t stop wondering who she was.

But the interesting thing is that we don’t actually know who she is. And that mystery makes the painting even more fascinating.

The painting is actually considered a tronie, a type of character study rather than a portrait of a specific person.

I decided to paint it as a practice painting.

When I started sketching, I quickly realized how precise the portrait is. While sketching, one of the hardest parts was getting the angle of the head right. Her face isn’t looking straight at you — it’s slightly turned — and capturing that angle was tricky.

The mouth was also not easy, and I spent quite some time trying to give it the right shape.

One part I really enjoyed was painting the deep, almost black background.

I also loved painting the clothes and the blue turban. Adding the small wrinkles, shadows, and folds brought the whole painting to life.

And of course, there is the pearl.

The pearl is actually the focal point of the painting. It contains both the darkest and the lightest tones, so your eye is naturally drawn to it.

Only later did I learn something surprising. Vermeer painted the pearl with just two brush strokes.

One of the trickiest parts for me was keeping the skin tones consistent. Every time I ran out of paint, I had to mix exactly the same color again — which is harder than it sounds.

This painting also helped me a lot with color mixing. I only used the three primary colors and white, which means every color had to be mixed from scratch. It took some practice, but now I feel much more comfortable mixing almost any tone.

While writing this article, I also learned something interesting. Vermeer is often called the master of light. When I looked again at the painting, I noticed that there is more light in the eye of his portrait than in mine — something I hadn’t noticed before.

The same delicate highlights appear in the pearl. Some historians believe Vermeer may have used a camera obscura, an optical device that helps artists study light and reflections more closely.

At my art school, copying master paintings is encouraged because it allows us to learn from the very best examples.

This experience has inspired me to continue painting portraits. I’m now working on a self-portrait, which I’ll share in a future newsletter.

Zélia, for SoliaVenture

P.S. The original Girl with a Pearl Earring is in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague. Seeing it there one day is definitely on my wish list.

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