Art History Inspired Project

Artist Statement:

For this project we were assigned and artist to research, then we got to pick any other artist to take inspiration from to create a piece. The two artists that I took inspiration from were Thomas Eakins and Claude Monet. The inspiration I took from Thomas Eakins was his subject and art elements. Eakins painted lots of portraits with solid background, and he often times had a prominent light source. In my piece I added a little twist to Eakins work and made a portrait of my dog instead of doing one of a human. Then like Eakins, I did a darker solid background. The inspiration that I took from Monet was his creativity with color. In this painting I forbid myself from using solid black or white, and for my shadows used lots or purples, blues, and greens. Throughout the painting I ended up using lots or orange, pink, and reds, and from close up you can see all the colors and they don't exactly look like they go, but the farther you stand away from the piece the more things come together and look more realistic.

The materials that I used for this piece were oil paints because I wanted to use the same material that both my chosen artists used. Then I also uses paint pens just to lay down a base to see where I likes my colors. I've only done one other oil painting in my life just because I have very little patience and it takes a long time to dry and many many layers to complete.

For this piece I first sketched out what I was going to draw, I used a photo of my dog as a reference using a pencil roughly circled out the highlights and shadows. I then use paint pens to start putting down some colors to see where I liked things and to make sure I could get my values to match the photo. After I went in with oil paints and played around with the colors some more. Since oil paint takes a long time to dry I wasn't able to get all my layers in, and I will continue to work on it. I am planning to show some prominent brush strokes to give it some texture, but if i do that while the paints wet it will just blend.