Art History

Artist Statement:

I was inspired by two artists: Georgia O'Keeffe and Claude Monet. Georgia O'Keeffe is an artist who worked a lot with Flowers, especially those at a close range. She was my main inspiration for this piece. Secondly, I was inspired by Claude Monet. Monet's style is less reflected in this because he was an impressionist, and used prominent brushstrokes in his work, which is difficult to replicate with colored pencil. He did, however, paint lots of flowers, and often experimented with light and color in his work. Like him, I tried to use many vibrant colors aspects of light. These two artists were a great inspiration for this piece.

For this drawing, I mainly used various colored pencils, as well as some graphite pencils to sketch out shapes. This drawing was done on a 9" x 12" piece of Mixed Media paper.

I went through several drafts to create this piece of work. At first, I wanted to use watercolor in my work, but I ended up choosing a material that was more comfortable for me: the colored pencil. I ended up sketching out the shapes of the flowers, then I slowly used the burnishing method to add layers of color and blend them together. This was supposed to give the colored pencil a smoother look. Finally, I went over all of the colors with a white colored pencil, which helped to smooth everything out even more.