A friendly community for art students I follow on YouTube and Instagram - Art.prof - set an art dare in October, in which I participated with three works.
In the following post I'll tell you more about these works and my experience.
You can find more info about Art.prof dare here or in this video:
For this dare we had to copy a work of art by a master from art history and learn from it. The artwork should have been created before 1950*. Thus, already the research on the topic is a nice excursion into art history.
Art.prof itself has provided a database of possible works. In this I found the first painting I wanted to try my hand at.
Portrait of Lady Elsie Meyer, February 1908 (charcoal on paper) by John Singer Sargent
I drew the portrait with a charcoal pencil in one of my sketchbooks.
The second picture "Glas met bloesemtakken" is by Jan Mankes, a Dutch artist. I found this drawing on the site of the Rijksmuseum, which has an extensive database of historical artworks. It is definitely worth browsing the site.
I made the ink sketch with a pen and brown ink. What surprised me most was how difficult it is to draw a long line in a controlled way. The nib often did not want do exactly as I wanted and if you hesitate too long, the pointed nib and the increased ink flow damage the paper.
The third copy I painted after the work "The Brooch, Eva Mudocci" by Edvard Munch:
The original is a lithograph (a print from a stone). Of course, I could not do that at home. That's why I used ink with a bamboo brush and drew the details on the face with a quill pen.
It was fun to paint with the brush in a much looser style than I'm used to.
I am glad that my pictures as well as other wonderful master copies were shown in the following Art.prof video:
Jordan said about my drawings: "You captured the spirit of what the original artist was going for, the delicacy in the lines of this piece is so evident for example"
Prof Lieu said: "Svenja became each artist... I almost feel like Svenja you were in a Hat shop and tried on different hats....becoming a different person every single time."
On this website you will also find the contributions of other art friends and the winners of this challenge.
I hope I can participate in more Art Dares in the future and inspire you to do the same. Check out Art.prof's website or watch videos on their YouTube channel. They have resources on all sorts of topics related to art and its study.
*The advantage of works created before 1950 is that you can often find images of these works royalty-free. For example in databases of museums like the Rijksmuseum.