the Original Jesi

I decided to try for something a little more difficult this time around. Still practicing with illustrator I have been delving into the tools paelette and experimenting witha  lot of things. Recently, I purchased a book for about $5 about Alphonse Mucha, a Czech art nouveau painter, and was pretty much in love with his work for a while. I came across one of the images I had saved on my computer:

A piece by Mucha and the base reference for my image

Beautiful piece am I right? Many of his are amazing to me. I love the graphical style that also seems rather painterly. Anyway, I decided to try my hand at it using Illustrator to create the line work, and also putting my own twist on it. In a way it’ s a self-portrait. Here’s the basic line work I started with in Illustrator:

Line work for Mucha Piece

And after spending a ridiculous 20 minutes trying to figure out the easiest thing in Illustrator (not sure why I didn’t google it sooner, stubborn I guess), basically the intersect tool, I had an easier time creating this piece. Rather than fool around with gradients and painting in Illustrator I decided to skip up to Photoshop. It took me a while to decide on a color palette, I just went with what felt good. Here’s the supposed final piece:

Final Color Piece

Obviously there are some cheeky touches in here and some distinct differences from the original reference, but I tried to keep true to the composition reference (and to Mucha’s beautiful overall design).

I might fiddle with some other color palletes later, but for now that’s all. Oh yeah, and just for kicks I was listening to this while painting in the finishing touches:

makes for some great mood music.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 4:31 am and is filed under WIP Art Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.