I absolutely love black and white photography, especially portraits. If it's done well it emits such a deep emotions. When I saw this photo by Konstantin Kryukovskiy (https://500px.com/photo/78185397/julia-by-konstantin-kryukovskiy) I immediately knew that I want to paint it. It was just so good! Obviously, I didn't want to copy it as it was, I tried to make it a bit lighter than the reference image.