Abraham Lincoln
Acrylic on Canvas, 2019
This was an independent project at home during a phase of trying out new and different art styles, movements and techniques. I had learnt a lot about different art styles through my time participating in ATAR Visual Art in high school and this inspired me to continue this at home and keep experimenting with my artworks. This project focused on the style of Pop Art, choosing Abraham Lincoln, a highly recognisable figure of American history.
A lot of research went into the art style of Pop Art, wanting to pin-point the features that made this movement and how I could translate it to another image myself. Below are some examples of different artworks in this style that I found as inspiration for this project, as well as some reference images of Abraham Lincoln that I worked off for this painting. I used Procreate to trace over a chosen reference image, noting the areas of shadows and highlights to create the negative and positive space of the Pop Art style painting.
For this project in particular, I wanted to try out the process of creating my own projector to use for tracing the image created in Procreate onto a canvas ready for painting. Once buying the materials I needed for this technique, I set up a magnifying glass on top of boxes and books to the height that would be the right fit for projecting onto the canvas. Once figuring out this height, I set up my phone on an adjacent stack of boxes at the same height just behind the magnifying glass and positioned them together to display the light and image from my phone screen through the magnifying glass and onto the canvas. Much like a projector, I had to experiment with how close the phone was to the magnifying glass and the angle that the magnifying glass was on to adjust the image to the right size and definition.
