Portrait in Pieces

Create a contemporary portrait with contemporary tools. Make a Pop Art painting with the special technique introduced in this course. This technique will combine drawing, masking, tracing, transferring, and painting in one artwork. Utilize your knowledge of tonality, color-mixing, and composing that will help you produce a piece that appears to belong in a modern museum. You will learn how to animate a portrait with a 5-step process. With this method, you’ll create an effect of shattered glass or mosaic with acrylic paint on canvas. There are many ways of creating contemporary art, but this one will be about using familiar tools in new ways.

Tracing is well-known from the Old Masters to contemporary artists and typically seen as something to avoid if you’re doing innovative work. In this case, tracing will be our first tool to make our painting 1. More precise, 2. More creative, and 3. More intricate. Masking tape is the second tool we will employ to divide and unify our portrait at the same time.

You will be selecting an image to work off of from your personal sources. We recommend a photograph of a face that is already remarkable in some way, in terms of lighting, expression, and color. Be prepared to have 3 different reference photos because you will learn in the first class which one will be the most suitable for the technique.