Artist Inspired

For this project we had to combine the art styles of two different artists, and I was given Jacques-Louis David: a neoclassical artist, and I chose Henri Matisse: a fauvism artist. The subject of this piece is a portrait of Jacques but done in a fauvism style as seen with the bright colors. There is no real setting of this other than the white of the paper. This artwork was made using the grid method to first sketch out the general shapes in graphite pencil, then it was fully colored in with similar tones of chalk pastels. I chose this artwork because I just did a self portrait before this, so I kind of got the hang of how to do portraits, also I chose fauvism because I thought this would look good in bright colors. Some elements and principals of design that I used are: color, value, and contrast. This artwork is composed in the center of the page.

I don't know what the composition rules or techniques are, so if I did use them then they are somewhere in there. My project was always evolving because as I went along I would select a color that would look that best for that area.

The meaning behind this artwork is to learn a bit about the two styles, and for myself to get better at drawing portraits because I haven't quite gotten them down yet. This project doesn't really relate to my life in any way. If I could go back and change something, it would probably be my medium because working with chalk pastel is not fun: they smudge easily, the colors aren't very bright, and they are hard to get even. My new medium would probably be acrylic paint because it is easy to work with, and it fits these styles better as they were both done in paint.