Self Portrait
Title: Flowers
Size: 91.44 cm x 91.44 cm Medium: Acrylic on Canvas Completion: November 2017 The intention for my piece was to show that women are perceived in Mexican Culture as nurturing and humble people. The piece was inspired by Alphonse Mucha's The Flowers. I drew the piece on the canvas by hand using pictures for reference. |
Inspiration
My piece will be inspired by Alphonse Mucha's painting Flower from the The Flowers series. Flower is a lithograph created in 1897. I will use this piece to keep my theme of Mexican culture with his piece showing how Mexican culture perceives women. This is perceiving women as always humble, submissive, and nurturing to others thinking about others before themselves. I will use the same aura this piece has however I will have the background pastel pink and I will have the triangles at the top of the portrait plain brown to mock a picture frame. I will also change her appearance to look more like me. I will make her hair black and the color of her skin will be altered to look like mine since she seems to have a green undertone and I have more of a golden undertone. Her skin is also more pale than mine so I will make the skin color slightly darker. I will alter her facial features such as her eyebrows since her's are very thin and mine are thick.
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Alphonse Mucha's work is famous for showing women in beautiful poses with intriguing designs with characteristics of the Art Nouveau movement. I will use these characteristics in my painting my having myself in the same position however I will make the portrait shorter. The portrait will be shorter because the original piece by Mucha is rectangular and my piece is a square which will not be adequate for the portrait. I will use the same techniques of having calm colors and having the figure surrounded by flowers which will make her look guarded by the flowers.
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Planning
The first sketch was inspired by Mucha's piece Daydream. I wanted something that had the same pattern in the back to make it look almost like lace behind her. However I decided against it after exploring and finding more of Mucha's works. I wanted to have something that showed that women are seen as delicate and therefore must be protected. After finding his piece flower I decided that's the one I wanted to stick with since the flowers in the piece almost seem to build a wall around her protecting her from the outside.
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After deciding I wanted to use the piece flower I practiced the flower i saw appear most often in the piece which was lilies. I wanted to practice drawing lilies from various angles to make sure I did a good job drawing them when i drew them on the actual canvas. I drew them from various angles and tried to move the petals around so that there could be various angles of the petals themselves as well.
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My last sketch was an attempt at drawing my face. I used the last portrait of myself i've done as reference. I only did the side view of my face since the face in the portrait is more at an angle instead of facing straight forward. I wanted to practice drawing my face because in previous drawings, paintings, and illustrations something i've constantly struggled with is making the face look well. The face shape specifically is something i struggle with so seeing as I was going to have to draw it by hand on the canvas I wanted to practice face shapes specifically mine.
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Process
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The first thing I did was building the canvas. I had to build the canvas with the dimensions of 3ft x 3ft so I got four frame pieces and put them together since they had inserts to connect them. After this I used the staple gun to staple the corners together to make sure the frame was put together in a way it would stay together. Before putting the staple in I made sure the two pieces were making a ninety degree angle. If the staple did not go in well I used the hammer to make the staple go in deeper into the wood. Then I used scissors to cut out a piece of canvas and I put it over the frame. I turned the whole thing around and stapled the canvas to the frame from the back making sure the canvas was tight enough so that it looked smooth but not too tight. After I finished building the canvas I went over the whole thing with gesso as well as the sides of the canvas. A skill i developed during this part of the process was learning to use a staple gun as well as knowing how tight to make the canvas on the frame.
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After the gesso on the painting dried I painted the whole thing pastel pink. However, I noticed that if I held the canvas so that the sun could shine through it I could see areas of the canvas where it looked like there was no paint so I went over it again in Pastel pink paint. Reflecting back on this decision it was not the best idea because after I did this I noticed the paint looked like it was cracking on top of the canvas presumably because there was so much paint on top of it. After this I painted the frame triangles on the top corners of the portrait to mimic the ones on the original piece however I left them blank. At first I thought about doing patterns on top of the piece with paint but I couldn't find a brush to make the lines as thin as I wanted so i experimented with drawing a thin line close to the border of the frame with white color pencil. This however didn't look opaque like the rest of the painting so I decided against it so that part differentiates from my inspiration in the sense that it doesn't have a pattern on the frame on the top corners of the portrait.
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After the frame was completed I divided the canvas into nine quadrants. I also divided my reference picture into nine quadrants to be able to transfer the picture onto the canvas to have the figure in my piece in the exact same position. The first thing I drew on the canvas was the arm on the lower right quadrant since the first thing I wanted to draw was the body so that I wouldn't have the trouble of not having enough space for the body with all the flowers or that I wouldn't be able to see where the body lines would be. However, I notices the face shape of the original woman on the piece was not the same as mine so I decided to look at the pictures again to compare. I realized my cheek bones were much higher than hers were and my chin was longer than hers. After I finished with the body and face shape I worked on the face and tried to make it look exactly like the picture of me that I had previously taken.
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After I finished drawing the figure I had to make the skin tone with paint. This consisted of lots of experimentation. The first thing I did to make the base color I would work with for the skin tone was making a mixture of paint that was half white, one fourth yellow, one eighth brown, and one eighth red paint. The base color I made was very pale and seemed to have a green undertone which would have been perfect for her skin tone but mine has a golden undertone and is slightly darker. I swatched a bit of my foundation on the paper to see the color I would want to make the paint look like. Foundation is a type of make up that is spread all over the face to cover imperfections of the skin and should match the color of the skin of the person wearing it exactly. I noticed the foundation looked very orange so I added red continuously and it seemed to not be doing much. Finally i added a bit of orange to a small amount of paint to test what it would look like and it seemed to work so I added orange paint to the whole mixture of paint. After this I painted the figure going in with a darker pink on the lips as well to give them definition. After this I drew and painted the flowers around her using white for the lilies and orange and blue for the other flowers. The last thing I did was paint her hair although I made her hair longer and black since my hair is long and black which is a distinction from the short blond hair on the original piece. I noticed that in the work of students they didn't give the face much dimension or contour so I tried to give my piece a bit of contour on the face by using dark paint to outline the cheekbone and then going over it with the skin tone so that the paint would mix creating light but noticeable contour on the cheek bone.
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Reflection
My piece is similar to my inspiration since they both have the flowers around the figure which makes the piece have circular movement. My piece is inspired by Alphonse Mucha's piece Flower which was made with the rest of his lithographs centered around flowers. The positioning of the flowers on both pieces gave the piece circular movement. The color in the pieces is a little different since the colors in Mucha's piece are more muted down and cool and the colors in my piece are warmer and a little less muted down. This is because I changed the color of the background from light green to pastel pink which changed the piece from looking like it has more cool colors to making it look like there are more warm colors. Something I could've improved on was having more flowers in the portrait and painting in between the flowers with black so it would look more like hair. A challenge I had was getting the skin color to look like my skin color since my skin color is different from my arms to my face. A success I had however was making the eyes look good and the nose as well since usually the most difficult part of the face for me is the nose.
ACT Question
Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
The cause effect relationship between my inspiration and its effect on my artwork is that it helped make the figure in the portrait more feminine and humble almost like a motherly figure protected by the flowers around her.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The overall approach the author has regarding my topic of inspiration is admiration and specifications about the techniques of the piece and the purpose of the piece is the historical context.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
The kind of conclusions I discovered about culture is that while this kind of attitude towards women is common in different places of the world and throughout history it is changing with newer generations with each generation seeing women as more independent and strong than the previous one.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The center theme around my inspirational research is the beauty of women and how they were displayed in pastel colors to show their delicacy and femininity.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
The kind of inferences I made while reading my research were that Mucha was against the structured and plain look of modern products that were starting to come out and wanted to bring color and aesthetic patterns to the world.
The cause effect relationship between my inspiration and its effect on my artwork is that it helped make the figure in the portrait more feminine and humble almost like a motherly figure protected by the flowers around her.
What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
The overall approach the author has regarding my topic of inspiration is admiration and specifications about the techniques of the piece and the purpose of the piece is the historical context.
What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
The kind of conclusions I discovered about culture is that while this kind of attitude towards women is common in different places of the world and throughout history it is changing with newer generations with each generation seeing women as more independent and strong than the previous one.
What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?
The center theme around my inspirational research is the beauty of women and how they were displayed in pastel colors to show their delicacy and femininity.
What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
The kind of inferences I made while reading my research were that Mucha was against the structured and plain look of modern products that were starting to come out and wanted to bring color and aesthetic patterns to the world.
Bibliography
Alphonse Mucha Org. “The Complete Works.” Alphonse Maria Mucha - The Complete Works - page 2, www.alfonsmucha.org/the-complete-works.html?pageno=2.
AlphonseMucha.org. “Flower.” Flower by Alphonse Mucha, AlphonseMucha.org, www.alphonsemucha.org/flower/.
AlphonseMucha.org. “Flower.” Flower by Alphonse Mucha, AlphonseMucha.org, www.alphonsemucha.org/flower/.