SELF PORTRAIT
Overview
Title: A Natural State
Size: 91.44 cm x 91.44 cm Medium: Acrylic Paint on Canvas Date: February 2023 Exhibition Text
"A Natural State" is an inserted self portrait inspired by Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The task I was given was to insert myself into an already existing portrait. I was challenged to replicate the forms and colors of my inspiration. In this piece I wanted to explore the idea of constants throughout the stages of our lives. In my life, even as I've gotten older, nature and the outdoors has always been a constant part of my life and identity.
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INSPIRATIONS
My inspiration for my self portrait came from the piece Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Flora is portrait of a woman made out of flowers, vegetables, plants, and other various objects. Her hair is compiled of an array of beautifully detailed flowers and her clothing seems to be made of leaves and flowers as well. What's really fascinating to me about this pieces is Arcimboldo's choice to make her skin and other facial features out of flowers as well. I didn't notice this at first glance, but was really intrigued by how small the details of this piece were. Even the smallest details of this portrait such as the eyes and eyelids are made up of other objects, showing just how precise this piece really is. When enhancing this painting and zooming in on it, you're truly able to see just how much detail was put into this piece. Every leaf and flower is full of detail which is something that I want to be able to replicate in my own piece. When researching portraits for this painting, I was immediately drawn to this piece due to its detail and the way in which Arcimboldo uses flowers and other plants in order to create those details.
This painting has a very natural yet vibrant color pallet, consisting of mostly greens, reds, yellows, and whites. The theme of this painting is alluding to the changing of seasons and the different stages of life, which I think is shown well through the items that Arcimboldo chose to paint. This painting is an oil painting which means that all of the aspects and details are very smooth and delicate looking. I want to be able to replicate the same qualities as an oil painting while only using acrylic paint, which will definitely be a challenge. Overall I want to take the delicateness and smoothness of the painting with me while creating my own version.
This painting has a very natural yet vibrant color pallet, consisting of mostly greens, reds, yellows, and whites. The theme of this painting is alluding to the changing of seasons and the different stages of life, which I think is shown well through the items that Arcimboldo chose to paint. This painting is an oil painting which means that all of the aspects and details are very smooth and delicate looking. I want to be able to replicate the same qualities as an oil painting while only using acrylic paint, which will definitely be a challenge. Overall I want to take the delicateness and smoothness of the painting with me while creating my own version.
PLANNING
After I had an idea of how I wanted the overall form and composition of my piece to look, I decided to move on and begin looking into the color pallet of my chosen inspiration. I made some swatches in my sketchbook and tried to color match some of the big colors in this painting that were showing up repeatedly. I also sectioned off the swatches by where they would show up in the work; wreath, skin, lower wreath, and the leaves. I noticed that the overall color pallet of this piece was very natural and had a lot of dull, earthy tones. The colors were also all very soft and warm, there were no super bright colors, which I needed to keep in mind for when I painted my own piece. I also decided that even if the background of my inspiration may look black, that I wasn't going to use black for my piece because I didn't want it to look too harsh. I decided that instead I would use a very dark brown that would still have the dark effect, but would appear a little warmer. |
I started off my planning by creating a rough sketch of the portrait that I was choosing to replicate. I did this in order to get a rough idea of what the overall composition of the piece is, and the specific factors that I would need to keep in mind when creating my own self portrait. I knew that I needed to capture the delicateness of this piece, and all of the fine details. There's so many small parts and pieces to this piece that I need to be able to replicate with my own work. Every part of Flora is made using flowers, even down to the eyebrows and eyelids. Each part of this piece is important and has meaning to the piece, so I needed to keep this in mind when planning out my own sketch. I also began to plan out how I was actually going to execute this piece. I decided that the easiest method, for the face at least, would be to paint a base color and then go back over it to paint in the actual petals of the flower using a different shade. I figured that this would be more time efficient and would be the most effective way to create this piece. I also decided that for my piece, I wanted my hair down and my hair to obviously be made of flowers. Even though the actual painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo displays the woman wearing a flower wreath, I believe that I will still be able to produce the same effect, just by having my hair down. I also decided to use colored pencils to create a rough sketch of what my own self portrait would potentially look like. I tried to add all of the aspects of my inspiration into my own work. One of the things I had to experiment with was how I was going to portray my glasses while still keeping up with the task of using flowers to create everything. I decided that I could use a dark brown and make my glasses seem almost like twigs, with some pieces sticking out at certain parts. By creating this rendition of my portrait I was able to see how my portrait may look in color, and I was able to make any changes I needed to make to my ideas before they actually got onto my canvas. |
PROCESS
After I had a basic sketch of everything I wanted to be in my portrait, I decided to draw out some of the more detailed key components of my portrait. I made my glasses into branches and began to draw flowers onto my face, clothing, and hair. I didn't want to sketch every single detail out because I knew that I would have to go over it with paint anyways. Once I had the key details sketched out, I began to paint my skin. I mixed together a base skin tone and covered all of the visible skin of my portrait, and then went back in with a darker shade to add some shading and shadows to my face. I also painted my eyes a dark brown.
Once I was satisfied with the base color of my skin, I began to mix a color to paint the flowers onto my skin. This was one of the most difficult parts of this process for me because this color had to be perfect in order to look right on the skin. The flowers needed to be just slightly darker then my skin tone so that they wouldn't be noticeable, but you would still be able to distinguish where the flowers were placed on my face. Once the facial part of my portrait was finished, I moved on to painting in the flowers for my hair. I started off with painting in some of the larger flowers with a base color. Once some of those flowers had been made, I mixed more colors to create different flowers. The process I followed was to mix a certain color and then use that color to create a variety of different flowers throughout my hair. When mixing colors I had to make sure a lot of the colors that I mixed were similar to the colors in my inspiration. The colors I needed to use had to be muted and natural rather than bright and vibrant so I had to use brown in a lot of the colors I mixed in order to make it look more dull. I repeated the process multiple times and the white space of my hair was beginning to fill up. I also had to be strategic with the way that I laid out the colors of the flowers. I didn't want too many of the same colors to mesh together, because I wanted them all to seem individual.
After I had filled up most of the white space with the flowers, I went in with a dark brown and filled in the extra gaps. I think this really brought this part of the piece together, and allowed me to fill more white space. Once I was finished with the flowers, I moved on to the leaves that would make up my clothing. This part didn't take as long as the flowers because I was able to make large blocks of color using different shades of green. Once the blocks of color were put into place, I went in with a brush and defined the edges of the green to make it more into the shape of a leaf. Then depending on the color of the leaf, I either went back in with a dark brown or a dark green to add more details into the leaves. |
I started off my process by stretching a canvas to the size of 91.44 cm by 91.44 cm. With a canvas this large I had to make sure that nothing was being warped or messed up while I was in the process of making it. I had to make sure I was being very precise. After my canvas was stretched and even, I started to gesso it. I put three layers of gesso onto the canvas in order to make sure that it turned out smooth for my painting.
After my canvas was prepped, I projected a picture of myself onto the canvas and did a rough sketch of the basic proportions and features of my face. I didn't want the sketch to be too detailed because I knew I had to go back in and make everything into flowers anyways, so I just sketched a basic outline of my hair, face, and shoulders. I mixed a color that worked for the flowers, and began to paint them onto my skin, before I realized that it would be smarter for me to paint in the larger flowers on my chin, cheek, and forehead. This was also very difficult for me to accomplish because for some reason I could not mix the right color for the blush that I needed to be displaying. It was very difficult to color match because the woman in Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo is a different skin tone than me, so I wasn't sure how the color on her paler skin would translate onto my skin. I had to do a lot of trial and error for this part of my project. I tried to mix a color originally, but it turned out more of a purple hue than a reddish hue. I remixed this color multiple times until I came up with a color that I thought would work well. I used that same color on the cheek and the chin, and used the color I mixed as well as a lighter version of it to create a flower.
After I added color to the larger flowers on my face, I finally began to paint the flowers onto the rest of my face. This part of the process was very delicate, and took a lot of planning on how to lay out the flowers on my face. I repeated this process until my entire face was covered in flowers of different sizes and shapes. I also had to mix a darker shade of this color in order to put flowers in the shaded part of my portrait. I was actually really happy with how this part of my painting turned out, because it was the part that I was most excited for. To finish up my painting, I had to paint the white flowers. It took a bit of brainstorming to come up with how I was going to complete this part of the process because I obviously couldn't paint white paint onto the white canvas. I decided to instead mix a slightly darker white shade and then use that color to outline the shape of the white flowers. After all of the outlines were created, I used a bit of yellow in the middle of some of the flowers just like my inspiration, Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. |
EXPERIMENTATION
The other main experimentation I did with this piece was in the different kinds of flowers I created throughout the piece. This entire piece has a very wide variety of flowers with different shapes and colors. I had to research the shapes of many flowers in order to replicate them in my own piece. I tried to spread out the placement of the flowers throughout the wreaths so that there were a lot of different flowers located in different areas. I experimented with the shapes of the flowers. I created some of them to be larger and round, while others were pointy and small. The type of flower that I created depended on how I needed to fill up a certain space. I found it difficult at some point to come up with what flowers to paint because I eventually ran out of flowers from my reference painting. I obviously needed more flowers in my piece than in my reference because I needed to cover a much larger space with the flowers. I had to experiment with the form, shape, and color of the flowers.
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A lot of the experimentation I participated in with this piece had to do with color, specifically shades of colors. This piece didn't use a lot of bright colors, so every color I mixed had to be muted with brown or other colors. I also had to experiment with color mixing because I was trying to match colors with my inspiration. Since this project was to insert myself into an already known portrait, I needed to try and replicate the same colors that are present in my inspirations work. There's obviously a lot of different colors present in this piece between the flowers in the wreath, face, and leaves. I needed to be able to mix a lot of colors, and do a lot of color matching to replicate this piece.
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CRITIQUE
There are clearly a lot of similarities between my piece and Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. The visual make up of these portraits are clearly very similar. The flowers on the faces, the leaf robe, and the large groups of flowers are very similar since the goal of this project was to replicate a portrait. Another similarity is that both of these pieces are portraits of a woman. The thematic topics of our pieces are also very similar. My piece A Natural State is discussing the idea of how nature has always been a constant in my life, even as I have gotten older. Similarly, Flora discusses the seasons and the different stages of life. Another similarity between our pieces is the figural forms that are present in the portraits. Both myself and the woman in Arcimboldo's piece are facing the same direction and centered in the same place in the piece. Both my piece and my inspiration also use a similar color pallet of natural colors.
There's also a few differences between my piece and my inspiration. My piece is a self portrait while Flora is a portrait of someone else. Another difference between our pieces is the mediums used to create the painting. Arcimboldo used oil paint to create his portrait while I used acrylic paint to create my piece. Arcimboldo's use of oil paint allowed him to create a very smooth and detailed piece. On the other hand, I used acrylic paint which I was still able to create a smooth look with, but not as smooth as Flora.
There's also a few differences between my piece and my inspiration. My piece is a self portrait while Flora is a portrait of someone else. Another difference between our pieces is the mediums used to create the painting. Arcimboldo used oil paint to create his portrait while I used acrylic paint to create my piece. Arcimboldo's use of oil paint allowed him to create a very smooth and detailed piece. On the other hand, I used acrylic paint which I was still able to create a smooth look with, but not as smooth as Flora.
REFLECTION
Overall this project taught me a lot about myself and my process as an artist. This is by far the largest painting I've ever created, and it really tested my patience throughout my whole process. I struggled a lot with my time management while creating this piece. I had multiple art projects going on at this time, and it was difficult for me to build time into my schedule to complete this piece because there was so much canvas to cover. This was an interesting project to complete because I've also never inserted myself into an already existing portrait. I'm used to coming up with my own forms and ideas in order to create a piece and I obviously didn't have that part of the process. My favorite part of this process was the painting of the flower hair. I really enjoyed mixing all of the different colors and painting all of the different kinds of flowers. My least favorite part of this process was trying to mix the perfectly right shade of color for certain scenarios. It got frustrating after a while to mix the same color over and over to try and duplicate the colors in my inspiration Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. I hope that others are able to look at my piece A Natural State and consider some of the constants in their lives that shape their identities.
ACT QUESTIONS
1. Clearly explain how you are able to identify the cause effect relationship between your inspiration and its effect on your artwork?
My piece is clearly a replication of my inspiration, Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and the inspirations that I took are very visually obvious. You can visually see the relationship between my painting and my inspiration.
2. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
How colors and forms have an impact on an overall piece.
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
I have discovered that people often associate certain colors with certain ideas. People associate natural colors with themes of nature and the outdoors.
4. What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
The different stages of life and the constants throughout those stages.
5. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
I inferred that when people use natural colors in their artwork, they often want the viewer to connect the piece to nature in some way.
My piece is clearly a replication of my inspiration, Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and the inspirations that I took are very visually obvious. You can visually see the relationship between my painting and my inspiration.
2. What is the overall approach the author has regarding the topic of your inspiration?
How colors and forms have an impact on an overall piece.
3. What kind of generalizations and conclusions have you discovered about people, ideas, culture, etc. while you researched your inspiration?
I have discovered that people often associate certain colors with certain ideas. People associate natural colors with themes of nature and the outdoors.
4. What is the central idea or theme around your inspirational research?.
The different stages of life and the constants throughout those stages.
5. What kind of inferences did you make while reading your research?
I inferred that when people use natural colors in their artwork, they often want the viewer to connect the piece to nature in some way.
CITATIONS (MLA)
“Flora.” Flora by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, https://www.thehistoryofart.org/giuseppe-arcimboldo/flora/.