Earlier this year, I did a series of portraits (at first it was one a week), and each one was to push my limits as an artist. I tried new mediums, as well as techniques, expanding my repertoire. A lot of these didn't end up how I liked, but were excellent teaching/training experiences.
I highly suggest checking them out, starting with the beginning.
Now, I'm picking up my portraits once again. Newly inspired by awesome artist Phil Hansen (now on YouTube), I am jumping back to the square and grid techniques from before.
Using punched paper dots (most notably found in office hole-punches), I am creating a portrait of the famous painter Vincent Willem Van Gogh.
I originally set out to just take one of his own self portraits, and grid that out. I opened up one of my large volumes on Van Gogh, and realized the prints in the book were pretty big anyways. Instead, I decided to use those as references, and sketch my own Van Gogh. Above are the attempts, and ultimately the one I ran with.The gridded version above is 8'h x 8'w, and I stuck with my usual x2 conversion. So, the finished piece will be 16'h x 16'w. I lined out about a dozen, 2-inch square pieces of thicker paper to use. then grabbed my bags of paper-dots, and went to work.
I've calculated there will be 64 paper squares, and each fit exactly (fortunately) 7 dots in both dimensions--49 per square. So, this portrait will have 3,136 dots on it.
In the last two days, I've worked five hours total on this project. This includes the prep-work of sketching references, gridding papers, and planning out colors. I am expecting many more hours, as my paper-dot collection is shrinking (mostly blues), and I have to punch new ones.
I'm excited about this project, and will keep updates coming along every couple of work-hours. Below is the progress thus far after 5 hours.
Link to next five hours.
No comments:
Post a Comment