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30 Days Drawing Challenge: A Road Trip Through Art History

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Lately I’ve been looking into ways to motivate myself to create personal pieces on a more regular schedule. It all kept coming back to doing a (at least) 30 days drawing challenge. Inktober is coming, but I don’t want to wait a month, I want to start already now! So I was looking into various existing challenges online and while they all seemed fun enough nothing really spoke to me. It became clear that if I’m to make this work I’ll have to find an exciting topic myself.  Somehow in the process of searching for inspiration an idea popped up in my head: I will create my own interpretations of classical paintings. My goal is to come up with 30 (for a start) digital (vector) pieces, in which I’ll be trying to keep to the following “rules”:

  • Keep to a minimal (maximum 6 colours) colour palette
  • Keep to a flat vector style with outlines
  • Keep the visual style as consistent as possible (another one of those “time-to-define-my-personal-style-already” things)
  • Keep as close to the original as the style allows, but deviations are still ok, it is also ok to chose to work only from a segment of the original piece
  • Any piece of art since the beginning of time till around mid- XX century is fine, as well as any place of origin of the artwork
  • There’s no list of art pieces prepared upfront (I want to keep this open and feel free to approach any piece that may catch my interest, although there are quite a few I’m pretty sure will make it in the chosen 30)

I’ll probably make up more rules as I go, but for now it is all pretty wide open. I only know that I want to explore a wide variety of art pieces from all corners of art history, but my goal is to interpret them in “my own style”, while at the same time keeping a feel of the original, but making all my interpretations consistent with each other and visually connected as a part of the same series. Oh, and let’s face it, these will probably be dominated by portraits of pretty girls, because that’s usually what I revert to when left to my own devices.

So what am I trying to achieve?

  • Have fun
  • Explore “my style”
  • Become more consistent in “my style”
  • Draw every day
  • Post new art every day
  • Refresh my art history knowledge
  • Explore and study different artists, periods and places
  • Practice
  • … and more?

For my first piece in the series I chose a painting I didn’t even know the name of ( I didn’t know the name of the artist neither), but have always loved. After some research I found out the painting is called “Magdalene with the Smoking Flame” by Georges de La Tour. I love the mystical atmosphere, the lighting and the way the girl is staring in the flame, reminds me of my own fascination with fire. Making the piece was a lot of fun and definitely a great start in the series. Let’s see what the next 30 days brings!

…Now that I think about it this might also have a little something to do with my enjoyment of this painting!

Also check out my process painting for this piece:

 

 

Follow my progress:

Sketches: on Instagram

Finished pieces: on Tumblr | Deviantart ? maybe…

Process videos: on YouTube (I won’t be recording all of them, though!)

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