Hello and welcome to another one of my creative experiments! This month, I dove into artist copies, also known as pastiche, (as I recently learned). This is a classic art-school assignment designed to help art students learn about color, composition and whatever medium they might be painting or drawing in. I remember being given this assignment in school and not fully understanding that I was supposed to put some of my own personality into it. I made a pretty straight-ahead copy, while other students did amazingly creative fun things with their copies. Perhaps because of this embarrassment, I hadn’t thought about this creative exercise in years, until I stumbled upon this blog post by the incredible Tor Freeman. I immediately wanted to try it again for myself, if only for my little past art school self who didn’t know who she was yet.
My first step was to find some art I wanted to copy. This proved to be the hardest part of this process for me. I knew I wanted to reference work that wasn’t contemporary, but which artists to choose, from all the amazing artists throughout history? I felt myself pulled in all directions. Should I focus on Surrealists? Golden Age illustrators? The Renaissance? In the end, I decided I would pick a few totally random pieces with no connection to each other besides the fact that I loved them. I also started to make a list of artists whose work feels important to me, as well as a folder of my favorite works for future pastiche practice.
Research! Looking through art books is one of my favorite things ever. Top is Frida Kahlo: The Paintings by Hayden Herrera, bottom is The Arthur Rackham Treasury Edited by Jeff A. Menges.
Coincidentally, as I was thinking about all this, the wonderful illustrator Mark Hoffman posted a “draw this in your style” or DTIYS challenge on instagram. This is the social media version of pastiche, except instead of copying an old master, you’re copying one of your peers/contemporaries. The DTIYS happened to be one of my favorites by Mark, a bear sitting at a sewing machine, looking very focused and making a complete mess of the thread.
So I decided this would be my first artist copy! It was an absolute joy to play around with this character and make it my own. I loved the patchwork-like texture in the background of Mark’s painting, so I emphasized that a bit more. I played with scale too, and added a pincushion that looks like the one my mom used when I was a kid. I’m pleased with how it turned out and I learned a lot in observing Mark’s original brush strokes and shape language.
On the left is “Sewing Bear” by Mark Hoffman, and on the right my homage/pastiche/artist copy.
A quick pause here to make an important note: artist copies are purely for practice. Especially when copying a contemporary artist’s work, I will refrain from sharing it online (unless the artist has made it clear that it’s okay for people to copy and share, as is the case here). I will always ALWAYS make a point of siting my inspiration and the original artist (tagging, hashtags, etc), and in general I will not put artist copies in a professional portfolio. Okay, back to the experiment.
I was feeling excited now, and of course I had spent so much time on the research phase that I was running out of time to write this blog post! But I did one more, this time based on an incredibly weird and cool illustration by the Slovak painter and graphic artist L’udovít Fulla (I believe this one is from a collection of Slavic folktales he illustrated, but I can’t find the exact source).
On the left a painting by L’udovít Fulla, and on the right my artist copy.
Something about the process of copying this 100+ year old illustration really made cool things happen in my brain. I loved the surreal scale, the huge people and tiny villages, the strange way that one of the figures is seemingly floating through the air behind the walking figure. It was such an interesting image to me that I couldn’t help but add my own touches, continue the story. Here are some little details that I’m particularly happy with.
I have to say, this process got me so excited about subject matter and composition that I started sketching ideas for my own original illustrations. I think I will save those for next month’s post as a kind of spin-off from this month.. we’ll see. Regardless, I highly recommend this process to anyone, whether you’re just starting to draw or you’ve been making art professionally for years.
Yay pastiche!
Want More?
If you want to dive even deeper into the practice of artist copies, join me on Patreon! I’ll be posting a video this coming week where I talk through my thought process, research and drawing methods.