The Process of Picassó
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| Published | EF Issue 2015.3 |
Publication date | Summer 2015 |
| Media type | Digital |
| Pages | 20-23 |
| Website |
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A look into Maria Picassó i Piquer's process found on pages 20-23 of the digital EF Issue 2015.3.
Article Transcript
Pop culture, TV series and fan art. I understand pop culture as a range of artifacts appealing to a majority of people. Despite the many flaws of media-dictated consumption, it also makes possible high quality products to be enjoyed, shared and discussed not only with those near you but also in worldwide company, satisfying one of our basic needs as human beings, belonging to a – massive – group. While a private commission or retail caricature creates an intense, intimate connection with that person, caricaturing pop culture personas allows us to connect with this whole zeitgeist, a huge artistic cloud where a simple logo (or music playlist) infers hours of memories and feelings you previously experienced as a pop culture consumer. Not for nothing, when shared on social media, a five-minute Batman doodle may attain more success than a 27-hour painting of your neighbor’s cousin. One of my favorite expressions of pop culture are television series. Longer screen time allows strong character development and absorbing world building. Of course, these traits can also be found in a good book or a memorable film, but series nowadays have that additional spice such as cliffhangers and immediacy — aka binge-watching! — that cause a kind of hype and excitement that one needs to channel somewhere: In my case it’s fan art. And judging by what I see on my social feeds, I am not the only one. I always finish my day watching an episode or two of a TV series. As a busy freelance illustrator working from home, I would dare to say this last month I spent more time with the “Parks and Recreation” cast than with my friends. Just as with friends, this long exposure to TV characters leads the caricaturist in me to hours of studying and analyzing their faces A Game of Thrones collection A Song of Ice and Fire novels are a good example of aforementioned strong character development and absorbing world-building. And there came the HBO series based on these books to invade the popular culture, our homes, Internet devices... and artist brains. I just had the need to turn the pre-season 5 excitement into something more productive than looking for casting rumors and reading tinfoil theories, so I decided to make a caricature of Game of Thrones. But, who is the main character there? I could not decide, so I chose fourteen, which ended up being sixteen by popular demand. Working on a collection, as on group caricatures, is for me a challenging exercise because homogeneity is an additional key factor to take into account. Coherent compositions, a matching color scheme, same amount of detail and similar shapes or angles are variables to be added to my two essentials: recognizability and appealing design. Sketching As commented before, one of the great upsides of portraying TV characters is the long time you already have together, so I sketched them from memory. I often begin my caricatures this way as one tends to remember the most relevant features. While results are not specially accurate or engaging, there are some shapes or lines that will be worth keeping in the final piece. Next step is gathering as many references as possible, both photo and videos, the more the better. Then I make new sketches, enhancing and filling in the blanks from the previous batch. When these sketches are decent enough, it is time to go digital. Choosing a color palette One of the easiest ways to get the homogeneity mentioned above is working with a limited color palette. Furthermore, it is a resource that I find eye-catching per se. When making a single caricature, I like to improvise a bit with colors and finish up retouching them with Photoshop or other apps. In this specific project, I wanted to choose them carefully so these colors would suit all the characters without need of further retouching. About an hour was invested in choosing five colors, starting with dark blue and pale yellow as extremes and finding useful tones in between in order to get a wide range of skin, hair and armor tones. As I work generously with gradients and transparencies, it felt like they were all the colors I needed. Giving shape to portraits Once the color palette was carefully chosen, shapes needed to be put together with a vector illustration program. Since the sketches were not definitive, I preferred not to trace, but using them as a guide to redraw with the precise angles and shapes provided by vector programs such as Illustrator or iPad’s Inkpad. Sometimes I am very happy with the first approach, but other times it becomes difficult to find the way to get a spot-on likeness with such few shapes. Then, my workload mainly consists of constant trial and error around shapes, colors, sizes and positions, in a procedure closer to graphic design or architectural planning than painting. For those readers interested in actual numbers, where as the Littlefinger caricature took me about 20 minutes, I spent many hours to get The Hound quite right. Finishing and sharing The benefits of working on personal projects are not only the chance to enhance my portfolio with something I genuinely like to work with but also the freedom of doing it with the terms I choose, as I am my own client. Therefore, I decided to share each caricature individually a few hours after I finished it. Regular publishing and sharing performs amazingly on both Facebook and Instagram. Plus, as anything related to Game of Thrones, this project had an extremely warm welcome from the fandom, reaching some viral success such as being featured on Buzzfeed. There was this crazy afternoon that I gained an Instagram follower every minute. Apart from the exposure itself, this not only provided encouragement to keep on working on the following pieces but also useful critique from artist fellows or even funny “separated at birth” ideas. Even some artists friends started their own collections or even their versions of mine. At the end of the day, this rewarding creative process of inspiring and being inspired is what we all fan artists and caricaturists do: our contribution to pop culture.
To learn more about Maria, visit her website at http://www.mariapicasso.com
Here is the link to the music playlist mentioned in the first paragraph: https://open.spotify.com/user/0oo0/playlist/2JbwfKeew4DIpbOruHcEak
See Also
External Links
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