My major inspiration for my piece was Anthony Van Dyck. I knew from the beginning that I wanted my piece to revolve around my mental health and the struggles I've been facing for the past 5 years. I really liked the unsaturated colors in the piece and the composition. It fits my meaning perfectly. The way that the painting goes from dark to light from left to right is perfect. It shows for me personally a movement towards the future and going forward, a positive connotation I wanted in my work. Sunflowers are often interpreted as happy symbols, therefore I wanted it to be on the right side of the picture, where the "change or progression" part of the art is suppose to be. Baroque was one of my intended styles for my painting due to me never painting in that style. I wanted to try something new.
This piece is called Vanity by Frank Cowper. I personally love this piece because the girl in it is so innocent and serene. I wanted to bring that innocence into my piece with myself. The rosy cheeks are definitely something I tried incorporating into my self portrait. The girl in the picture reminds me a lot of me in certain aspects such as we both have very pale skin and red hair. Hair is something I struggle with when painting and I tried as much as possible to draw inspiration from those colors and movement so my hair looked accurate. Otherwise, I didn't pull much inspiration from the composition of the piece, it was more of the stylistic components of the painting that I wanted to pull into my own art. |
For my first planning sketch, I wanted to firstly plan out who I wanted to inspire my piece, my personal requirements and the meaning I wanted to be portrayed. I ended up choosing I wanted mental health to be my meaning and my main inspiration to be Anthony Van Dyck. I then added a picture of the photo that will inspire me and I circled the key elements that I will add to my piece. The main elements are the sunflower, the contrast of hues, and the way he was positioned. What made me excited was he was holding a chain, which I could get rid of and replace with anything I truly wanted.
The Self-Portrait with a Sunflower was made during the Baroque period so I wrote out some key features of the baroque period so I could make sure I was keeping it in the same style consistently. Then I picked some key colors that I knew would be in my self portrait such as rich oranges and deep purples. Then I sketched out my first version. It used negative connotations of my mental health such as destructive habits. Self harm was a huge part of a coping mechanism for me for years and I wanted the thing that I would hold to be razor. Then the flower would be wilting for the deterioration of my mental health. However, all these symbols don't depict how I'm moving onto better places, they made me feel as if they represent how I'm still stuck, which I like to think I'm not. My second sketch is a positive sketch. The flower is healthy, I'm not holding a razor and the background is light because I'm moving towards better things. This is the sketch I ended up choosing because most of my work has negative views and I wanted a positive piece for once. Of course, I'm not ignoring that I still do struggle with my mental health, but I am improving. My clothes are the dramatic part of this painting because I really wanted it to be Baroque styled, so I planned that in my sketches. Lastly, my old vs. New sketch. I used old styles of art, like baroque, mixed with new. I was thinking more along the lines of simple geometric shapes. The paring between the old and new could be a meaning of how I still deal with these struggles, but I'm moving on and coping. However, I didn't think aesthetically it would be pleasing and would fit in with my other works as a whole. |
I decided to start out with the clothes for my self portrait. Since it is the most attracting part of my piece as a whole. I used light oranges at first and very unsaturated colors, but as I progressed I started using bright oranges and purples as the shadow. I didn't like using the black because it has a green base and it didn't pair well with the orange.
Here you see my sleeve done fully. I used the bright oranges along with light oranges where highlights were needed. The purple really compliments the orange in my opinion, so I kept it. Being so rich of a purple, it almost seems like a black, so I thought that turned out nicely. Here is when I started painting the hands. I'm very pale in general so I used a very light peach. As for the shadows, I used a purple based brown that I mixed myself and blended it out. It created a lavender shadow when mixed with the skin tone color. My nails were black in the picture so I painted them a very simple black color that complimented the painting as a whole. This is the completed t-shirt. It has a lot of contrasting tones, which brings great drama and dynamic to my piece. Then I started the sunflower. I kept the greens very deep and rich so it all harmonized with my piece. The brown blob that is visible in the top right corner is the middle of the sunflower. I used browns and whites. In this picture I was pretty advanced in my work. I got my face down and I was done with the sunflower. I used similar colors as my hands in my face, and I added peachy colors to my face to create that innocence I wanted from Frank Cowper's work. Of course there is that harsh contrast between the peaches in my face and the dark almost black looking colors on the right side of my face. In the sunflower, I used ochre for the base and added warm tone browns and cadmium yellows for the highlights. |
Clearly, the difference between the original piece and mine is visible. However, it is also visible who inspired my piece. The position of our bodies are similar, however the composition isn't the same. I'm positioned more at the corner of the painting. The sunflower in Anthony's work is more defined and precise, however ours looks very similar. Our hand positioning isn't the same, but very similar. Overall the colors are the same in the manner of saturation. Between me and Frank Cowper's work, there isn't anything too similar. The hair in my piece doesn't have the same color and the flow is nothing like in Cowper's, However the rosy cheeks worked very well in my piece, similar to Cowper's. I plan to go back in and edit this to try to mimic her hair as much as possible. |