The final project for this class was an invitation to design our own project in an area of interest related to
the course. It was “a learning opportunity. Do not squander the opportunity on a project
designed to show off what you already know how to do well. Challenge yourself. Engage the
process of trial-and-error rigorously and creatively.”
I find comfort in using ink and lines for most of my works. It’s the material that I feel works best for me. Black and white is also something I work with the most. I’m a huge fan of contrast and making bold designs, but I guess I can be a little bit intimidated by the power of colors. So, I decided to focus on the two major areas that I tend to subconsciously avoid whenever creating an artwork; painting & color.
Obviously, when combining those two words together, only one artist comes to mind: Vincent Van Gogh.
Van Gogh beautifully masters color and has a style/technique that allows me to call him my favorite painter. I knew I wanted to use him as inspiration. After doing some research I came to terms that I wanted to recreate one of his famous self portraits and after speaking to my professor, I decided to paint a friend of mine instead of Van Gogh himself.
The image on the right is the one I took from my room-mate. As you can see, in comparison to the Van Gogh self portrait that I chose (his 1982 self portrait), they are very similar in terms of composition. Nonetheless, I wanted the two pieces to have a couple of differences so that my final piece could have simply been inspired by Van Gogh, and not an exact replica. This way, I have the freedom of applying my own touch to it. So, i decided to use a female rather than a male. I also told her to look away from the camera since in his portrait, Van Gogh’s eyes are sharp and staring directly to you as a viewer.
One aspect that I observed and focused on was making sure that when I began to apply paint, I was aware of the different tones and areas of shade/light in the Van Gogh painting. This way, I could apply it very similarly to my own painting. So, what I did was create a line drawing separating the tones or areas of dark/light. In my opinion, this turned out as a beautiful piece itself and I could only imagine it with a fine ink pen, but I had to focus on this assignment. Hopefully I’ll do something like this in the future!
I knew I wanted to keep the background very similar to the original piece made by Van Gogh himself. This is a quick trial I carried out on my personal sketch book. I thought this was an important step; to simply sit down and see what is the outcome of me using a medium I have very little control and practice with.
On this next image, I simply show the first step of applying the acrylic.
