Wednesday, January 12, 2011

"Capturing The Butterflies"

The other day my sister and I were in an art and framing store that was going out of business. The store had practically been wiped out but still had an abundance of paintings for sale. A work of art caught my sister's attention. It had been a simple painting of beautifully colored butterflies. I asked her what attracted her to this particular painting. To my surprise she told me her husband loved butterflies and she wanted to buy it for him. The painting seemed pricey in my opinion, but it was half off. Since my sister had a limited amount of funds she saw another lady interested in the same piece of art, so my sister told her to go ahead and take it. The only reason she let it go so quickly was because I told her I would try my hand at making her a similar painting that would capture the idea and feeling of that original painting. All I needed from her at this point was a couple snap shots of the painting and for her to email them to me and I would do the rest.


The trick to reproducing art, in my opinion is to capture the overall aesthetic of the piece you are trying to reproduce. A reproduction doesn't have to be perfect but getting it close to color, form and medium is crucial. In my case because the original painting was done in oil with vibrant colors resembling an acrylic painting, I recreated it in acrylic. In my opinion,  acrylic paint is easy to use, non toxic and more affordable than oil paint. Sometimes in order to get the right consistency and color to match that of an oil paint you may want to slow the process down by adding a mixture called slow-dry to the paint. This mixture can be found at your local art store. Not only does the mixture get the paint to dry slowly, but it has the effect of giving the painting a more dimensional look. Although oil color may resemble acrylic it is not an easy color match, so I would recommend experimenting with mixing paint colors in small quantities to achieve the desired effect. When the mixture is where you want it to be then try making enough of it to complete your piece of art.


In addition, getting the scale done correctly, in my case, butterflies is also important. Even though I don't have many butterflies to paint, I need the butterflies to be the right size in proportion to the rest of the painting. You might want to consider drawing the form first on your canvas with a pencil before you start painting. All in all, trying to recreate a duplicate of someone else's work is not without flaw. You will always see that imperfection or color mismatch that you didn't want. In the end, the reward is your painting getting the same "WOW" reaction as the original and maybe improving your skill.