Following Dom's chair portrait, I was happy to find a house in Toronto with Mies van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich's Barcelona chairs. I was dying to try them out since in the famous Barcelona pavilion you cannot even touch them.
I took self-portraits with the help of my iWatch, and intentionally included my gadgets with me. This chair is a late '20s Modernist design, and I was eager to show it alongside century-removed technology. I wanted a portrait of the chair, and my figure to be nothing but a conductor to the present moment.
I've once again worked in ink, this time being careful not to use too much water with the cartridge paper. Since I loved the '70s feeling of the first chair piece, inspired by Hockney's portraits, I wanted to use the signature pastel green of the decade, a personal favourite. I knew the browns of the leather chair would complement the light pastel colors of my outfit as well.
First I isolated the shapes I'm going to be using from the reference photo I took. i quickly outlined them in Procreate to see how they would work in the big A3 format.
While choosing colors and planning the composition, I've kept in mind Dom's piece as well. I figured I'd like to display them together, so opposite tonal location would work together. But while the black leather of the Eames could balance out the strong yellow and red of the Berlin loft, the Barcelona was smaller and softer, so I kept the accents tame in comparison.
This is where I obviously let my design freak flag fly. I can get obsessively particular about the composition and colour scheme, so I needed to balance this out with some chance medium encounters.
I've again used a drop picker to let some ink fall out of the wall art, and then used the wax pastels to add some random pattern to the wooden floor boards. This has to be some of the most satisfying parts of finishing a piece, just water and diluting the existing texture.
In both of these pieces I was heavily influenced by the golden era American illustrators. The way Rockwell shows materials, or the translucency of Leynedecker's take on human skin has always amazed me with their tasteful play of softness and detail.