Drawing this portrait gave me so much joy and fulfillment! I made it when I was away on a retreat and listening to lectures. Nothing better than drawing while listening to inspiring lectures! 🙂

This portrait is based on the famous oil painting La Scapigliata by Leonardo Da Vinci. I had the image on my phone while I was drawing. The lovely and sweet look on this face made it such a pleasure to draw.

Initially I felt a little intimidated to take such a famous portrait of such a genius artist as inspiration. As if that is something I just should not touch. But it turns out that it is wonderful and a great help to take such a beautiful artwork as example, because of the quality and the beauty of the work. All I had to do was to stop listening to that voice of fear and insecurity, start to look closely and carefully at the portrait and then just try to translate that using my own techniques and skill level.

It helped of course that my intention was not to copy the work, because then I would have become frustrated I guess. I just wanted to take this portrait as an inspiration and create my own portrait based on it. I used very basic materials: I just worked in my Filofax planner, because that’s what I had on hand at that moment, and a mechanical pencil with eraser. That’s all you need really, no fancy supplies necessary.

It was so meditative to work on this portrait, slowly shading her face layer over layer. And with each stroke it is as if I got to know this face a little better.

This portrait was a first exploration of the lesson that I will be providing as a guest teacher in the online art course Love Art Happy Life, which is hosted by Marieke Blokland and will start January 1st. This course is all about art, being inspired by famous artists, and having fun creating. All the guest teachers in this course will be providing a lesson inspired by a famous artist.

I couldn’t choose between two giants in art history and major sources of inspiration: Rembrandt and Leonardo, so I just chose both, hehe! 😉 But who knows, this first exploration for my guest lesson really got me drawn to Leonardo…