Art History Inspired Project

For this piece, I wanted to do something that I am not used to so I decided to use new materials to create this picture which is a style that I am not used to, but I really like. This was defiantly one of the more creative projects that I have done this year and having the creative freedom in a project is something I really enjoy so this was fun for me to do. This piece is inspired by the works of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. These two artists stood out to me because of the way they created art and how it was different from what people were used to.

To create this piece, I used oil pastels on black paper. I hadn't had much experience with oil pastels but I knew that I like the way the showed color and it was also fun using them. My beginning plan was to just draw on regular white paper, but I changed it to black paper because I thought it was cool how much it brought out the color from the oil pastels.

I experimented a lot with the oil pastels and figuring out where to put each color in order for the final result to look good. The way Henri Matisse used bright colors in his early work to make his art stand out really inspired me to use this type of technique of making the color, the most relevant in this piece. In Matisses' "Woman With a Hat", he sort of collected colors in the background to not mix, but to create a visual of many different colors together but on their own at the same time and this is what I did in my piece. When you think of Picasso, you probably think about how his work was more abstract, and it was harder to recognize. I didn't add that element of his work into mine, I focused on the way he drew specific facial features. For example, the nose of the person in my piece reminds me of Picasso because it is simple and not very detailed, but it adds to the depth of the face. I also drew my eyes and lips to be very defined and shape oriented, similar to Picasso's eyes that he would draw. If I were to keep going on this piece, I would maybe add more color and create the face to be more dramatic.