If just simply given the assignment : “copy the artist’s work”, I would have had a much tougher time really drawing the artists work. The research that I had to go through writing the essay about his life, his techniques, materials really helped me grab a feel about how I could mimic his style of painting/drawing.
If I’m being totally honest, copying is something I’ve been doing my whole life. Of course it requires skill and it’s not something that’s easy to do. But it is way easier to copy someone else’s artwork than create something thats 100 percent original of my own.
Lautrec is one of the artists I was very familiar with. Living in Paris, I’d see so many of his paintings, I knew exactly how I would mimic his art. As a child I always thought his paintings were done with colored pencils. The bold colors that were not really blended out with others but holds its color within themselves. Something that oil paint cannot do. This thought that i had helped me in deciding what kind of material I wanted to use to copy Lautrec’s art.
For the studies, because I was so familiar and knew exactly how his style was, I didn’t really do a lot of research and discovery. I wanted to get a sense of his brush strokes, how to convert them into the feel of a hard colored pencil tip unlike the soft end of the brush. For the study I did two Lautrec’s famous paintings, and one dog.
My final piece