Moving away from a Pastiche

When it comes to refining you work to a higher level, you must ask your self this question - is my work a pastiche of the artist's work?

A pastiche is a work of visual art, literature, theatre, or music that imitates the style or character of the work of one or more other artists.

Although it is only natural that in the early stages of your project that you will find yourself potentially copying the artist's style, colour palette, compositions, subjects etc. In order to produce refined work you must push away from the artist and produce work that is original.

Basically, it's a good thing that we can see the influence in your work - however your final pieces should not be a direct copy.

After researching an artist for weeks and developing work in their style you may find this naturally difficult. One of the best ways to explore your work in a new way is by pushing it through a new art medium. So for example if your artist is a portrait painter, why not develop your images into prints of a 3D Sculpture?

The more mediums you push your work though, the more original it will become, however this does not always mean that the more mediums you explore the better the work will become. We explored this as a concept in the slideshow to the left, where A-Level Photography and IB Visual Arts students highlighted how many mediums they had pushed one image through - check it out.

Not only did we find that students who pushed their work though at least three mediums went on to creating the most interesting work, we also found that these students secured the highest grades,