Jean Michel Basquiat

A couple days ago I set out to draw a portrait of Jean Michel Basquiat. I've been drawing a lot of portraits lately (which I will be making blog posts about pretty soon), but I decided to do something different for this one. First off I want to mention that this drawing was a hell of a lot of fun, and I found myself adding much more to it than I intended. And I also think I should mention that I am a huge fan of Basquiat's work. He's one of the first artists I really connected with, so this was a portrait that I had a lot of enthusiasm for. Although I don't usually like to copy the artwork of others the simplicity of his art is so unique that I felt it was neccissary to create a combination of his artwork along with my own.

So I started with a reverse drawing, white on black paper. But I quickly decided I should add more color to it, and so I ended up using my dads color pencil set that I bought him and adding about 15 different colors to the picture.

What resulted was a ton of different layering and a type of color explosion that made up the portrait.

After resulting color scheme was actually less Basquiat and more of my own personal color style (also a lot of Alexander Girard like colors) I'm actually really happy that it turned out that way though because I didn't want this to be a Basquait rip off but more of an ode, or a personal letter. After I finished the portrait I moved onto the rest of the drawing, I tried to mimic sections of Basquait's own paintings rather that trying to draw Basquiat inspired images. I just thought it was more recognizable that way. I had to include words since they often appear in his art.

The result was something that came together more as a whole, and although a lot of my portraits only take up a portion of the page this one took up the full page, which I think made it closer to a painting by Basquait.