Turning an ink drawing into a colored piece of art
My original ink drawing
A fun practice of mine is to find a portrait of someone and reinterpret it. I often find interesting photos from Instagram to use as a starting point. Using a pencil I lightly draw out shapes until a composition forms that seems interesting. For this portrait, there was something about the person that had a sense of confidence, so I chose to emphasize bold shapes and features such as the glasses, nose, hair.
The drawing with color added
Once the pen and ink drawing was rendered, I wanted to give it some color to take it out of the simple black and white contrast of a drawing. After scanning the artwork, I separated it in layers using Photoshop, where I could add color to shapes and create a solid background. For a strong graphic quality, I used just a couple bold, flat colors.
Since the background shapes floating around the face were so strong, I chose to give them a lighter blue in order to allow the face itself to stand out.
You can see the separated layers in this Photoshop screen capture.
Later I chose this image to recreate as an acrylic painting, one of a series of twelve paintings I developed on 12x12” canvases. You can see how the composition changed considerably here from the original. In addition, I developed a textural effect for the background and painted in a small glow around the face. This was not meant to reflect the original work so much, which freed me up to improvise and take it in different directions.
Creating an acrylic painting of it
I hope you enjoy this image development. It is interesting how one can continue to iterate on artwork to land on new and curious forms and compositions.
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