So I decided to continue working on this piece, though it didn't work out for my first home project. I now want to take it in a different direction than the original vision I had for it after being inspired by a piece I did for my spotlight artist assignment: Intimacy by Thomas Blackshear.
I think that this piece is really eye catching and I like the fact that it is not overwhelming surreal or fantastical but just enough for people to get that occult or magical feeling. I like the subtlety of this painting's otherness and am particularly drawn to the light and shadow as well as patterning within the piece. It is eerie and magical without being overtly un-human and that is what I want to capture in my own piece. I finished tracing all of the outlines and shadows and then took the paper off. I am kind of irritated with how light the pencil lines showed up - you can barely see them on camera even after I have re-defined the major contours. I also want to do this piece predominantly in one medium, as many of the artists I have been exploring recently whose work I think is particularly
successful do this and I want to focus on craft not necessarily mixed media. So I think I'm going to do it in gouache as my other portraits have been. In the end, I just used Muriel as a reference photo but I do not want the end result to be an image of her per say so I will likely alter the facial features. I also really want to incorporate pattern into the clothing even though there isn't any in the
original photo. I haven't decided what my occult element will be but I really like the idea of doing startlingly bright eyes as I have always been interested in images of the eye.
Doing a more stylistic and less realistic portrayal of this figure will also add to the surrealness I think and having a strong light source with nearly-black shadows will also help. However, I do need to figure out where the light is coming from because in the original photo, there is more of an ambient light source.
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