Art History Inspired

Surreal Emotion

8" x 10"

The story behind this piece is that I had studied the art history movement Expressionism, and I found interest in the art movement Surrealism. So I ended up having this piece inspired by both movements instead of it being inspired by an artist, so I would have more creative freedom with what I wanted to create. This piece relates to my life because before I made my "surreal" changes to it it was a self-portrait of myself, also, I studied the movement Expressionism.

I used a variety of graphite pencils and some colored pencils to create this piece.

I took the self-portrait and then printed off an image in color of red carnations and their petals. I then cut them out and glued them onto my gridded self-portrait. I started with a 4B pencil to add the background and added the color pencil while using the grid method, but didn't stay accurate for some of the colored parts. I then used a variety of pencils to finish the piece, and I also used a tortillion for a lot of it. I forgot to have some sort of surprised expression on my face in the reference photo so I had to freehand the mouth and change some other parts of it to make it more dramatic and more "expressive" to fit the Expressionism theme. My next steps would be to redo the reference photo and make more accurate changes to make it even more expressive. My art evolved when I added the colored pencil.