Ricardo Bessa

I looked into some artists that communicate a story well, and came across Ricardo Bessa. I really liked his use of colour, as he only uses a select few colours but in different shades to create light and dark. I thought this might work well in my project, especially using the colour schemes of red and blue as he did in the two pictures above because it would show that my drawing is a forest at night, while the red could represent the forest being in fire. At this point in the project I was also feeling quite stuck and in a slump with my art. I didn’t know how I wanted to draw anything, what mediums I liked, or what I wanted to create at all. So any inspiration was welcome.

I tried to imitate Besso’s work, but used acrylic paint. This didn’t translate well from the original digital medium, and I struggled to mix a variety of different shades of a different colour without it becoming muddy. The red blobs on the ground are meant to be red embers, but they don’t look like embers at all. Overall this drawing was unsuccessful, but I still liked the colour scheme, so I want to try it in a different medium. When this painting was really didn’t help my art block, but I was still determined to make the drawing work. I also realised that I just kind of threw myself into painting this, and didn’t really know how to draw a monkey properly.