Pencil drawing: Portrait Georges Seurat | Pencil drawing by Martin Missfeldt

Image Description

This pencil drawing shows a portrait of the French painter Georges Seurat. He was the founder or inventor of Pointilism, an art movement at the end of the 19th century. Seurat's Pointilist paintings put Impressionism on a scientific footing by painting his pictures using small dabs of fractions with the primary colors of red, yellow and blue. From a distance an optical mixture of the colors sets in the eye, so that for example from red and blauebn dots a violet surface develops. His strictly conceived pictures are not like those of the Impressionists by exact observation before nature entstenden, but by calculation in the studio.

I've been a big fan of Seurat since I was a student - though not so much because of his paintings, but because of the artistic attitude and otherwise normal, bourgeois life. In my pencil drawing, I tried something absurd: to create a pointilist drawing. Basically, pointilism has always been closely intertwined with color. In that respect, I didn't know what to expect. I created the drawing with the help of a reference picture, which I stuck behind my drawing paper (HAhnemühle). With the help of a light table, it was then relatively easy to get the proportions right. However, it was more difficult to hit the appropriate gray scale value - especially because the room lighting had to be quite dark.

This drawing was the first one in months that I felt like it was moving me forward. It's just this path that I now believe could actually lead to something new and unknown.

Read more about ...

• Zeichnungen / Zeichnen lernen
• Perspective drawing with vanishing point and vanishing lines
• Tipps für die Bewerbungsgmappe (Kunststudium)