Term 1 Project: Abstract Colour Skulls

After my tutorial with James Green and looking at Picasso’s post WWII skulls, I started trying to create my own abstract skulls. I don’t produce abstract work as a rule. I find it very difficult letting go of realism and detail. I also don’t often work in colour, as I tend to prefer greyscale and black and white. As I rarely work in either of these ways, I decided to combine the two.

I began attempting abstract colour skulls simply using oil pastel. I thought the colours would be vibrant and rich. However, I didn’t enjoy using them for this piece. Actually, I didn’t feel this piece went well at all. ‘Abstract Blue Bean Skull’ wasn’t pristine and sharp enough – the edges blurred, the colours smudged with the black and I was overall unhappy with the outcome.

Instead, I tried using chalk pastels and working from my imagination. I purposely picked colours that don’t relate to the skull (especially not the ‘primitive’) and that I wouldn’t normally use. Pink, for example, I can never imagine using as a dominant colour in a piece.

Again, though, I wasn’t really very impressed with the outcome. The pink skull, especially, lost the abstract feel and turned more Impressionist.

Instead, I decided to try using MS Paint. I’ve enjoyed using Paint in the past, and thought this would be a simple way to persuade myself into abstraction and colour. MS Paint would limit the shapes I could create, forcing me to simplify the skull, but also allowing for clean edges and filling of shapes quickly to see what colours worked where.

So far, I have only created the abstract colour skulls from imagination, and mainly focused on having alternating shades next to each other. Next, I plan to create abstract skulls using a reference point of a real skull photograph. I also intend to place colours depending on areas of shading and definition rather just alternating the colours.

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