13/02/21 - Week 19
van Dyck, Sir Anthony van Dyck, 1640
Here is the original image I used for inspiration for my piece this week. I chose this piece in particular mainly down to the colour pallette and expression. I really liked the use of sublte blue all throughout the piece accompanied by the deep but soft brown. These two colours together really work well and I intially wanted to try to replicate this pallette in my own work. The expression is capturing and emphasised by the use of the lighting which is rather spotlight-y, focusing on the face and shoulder that van Dyck is looking over. The expression is of concentration but also has a lot of personality in it and almost appears like we are being drawn by the artist themselves.
To start with this piece, I used the method that I have been using in the past portraits, this includes taking a photo of my work and holding it up to the image which allows me to see my errors much easier. As you can see, the proportional and accuracy improvements here were extremely beneficial to the piece and the sketch became a lot more realistic which would be easier for me to deal with. I think I could have worked a bit further into this sketch and I think it does come of a little more stylistic than I would like and this definitely shows in the finished piece, but I think that this sketch is a rather good start.
As I got further into this piece, as mentioned, I wanted to try to get the blue-ish tint into the skin and since the hair was black on the model I felt it would be appropriate to use the blue here as a light colour. I think that in the end this was a mistake as looking at the initial inspiration and my piece, I feel that the yellowish brown against the blues is what creates the balance, so having a orange or yellow undertone in the hair would have helped this piece a lot as it became too cold quite quickly. I also decided to use pencil for this piece as though the original is not pencil, it was not the brush work that inspired me, more so the colour palette, and since I am not very accustomed to paints of any kind I thought it might be easier to use a medium that I have at least a little experience in.
As you can see at this point in the piece, I had noticed that the hair had become too cold and was standing out a lot against the warmer tone of the skin. I decided to try to add a light background to the piece to see how it would impact the colours, I used a brown much like the brown background in the original, to me, I felt as though this made the blue in the hair stand out more and it felt out of place. I was not too worried about the skin at this point and I felt I had quite nicely included some blue and warmer reds to it to create some balance. I was a bit stuck at this point, in the original image, the model had a red top and I thought that this would perhaps balance out the blue of the hair, so instead of the top being blue, the top was red instead of the hair having the warmer tint.
As you can see, this decision perhaps wasn't the best and if I were to go back and be able to change this decision I would have instead made the top a blue tone or tried to work into the hair to add a warmer tone. I would mainly do this because of the fact that this piece was supposed to be representative of the initial inspiration, but as a whole without that in mind I actually like this piece and the colour palette though perhaps a bit more abstract. I like how I have mixed the colours in this piece and I do, in the end, like the style and expression of this piece, though obviously it is a bit off brief.
I tried really hard with the shading on this piece and I think it is rather successful, I decided to use some white pen to add some small highlights to the glasses and face which helps this piece to pop and look a bit more realistic than the style of it perhaps implies.
Overall, I like this piece for the sake of the outcome but it is definitely not what I should have created this week so in that sense this piece is a bit of a failure but as I have said, it was not a waste.
VAN DYCK. A., 1640. Sir Anthony van Dyck [image] Available at:
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