Artist: Irina March

The reason I chose this piece of artwork to do a critique on was because my eyes were drawn to it’s originality, I have personally never seen any artwork that is quite like this, especially with this broad range of colour.  I have seen many different forms of this piece of artwork as the photograph and also in many black and white drawings and paintings, but never with colour. This particular artist uses the same technique for all of her artwork, although they are different portraits of Hollywood stars/ starlets, they all seem to show the same watercolor paint drops.

The strengths in this piece were that she was able to create such a strong line between the aspects of the artwork that were painted and the completely white parts, that help shape the portrait. The edges of the images are very clean and shape and I believe that is a very important reason for why the artwork turned out so well. Another strength in this piece of artwork was the use of colour, she was able to mix many different colours into this image, but by staying on the theme of spring like colours that are bright and vibrant. She was also able to use the watercolour paint effect great as none of the drops of paint are too faded nor too dark. The only weakness of this piece to me was that some parts of the art didn’t have enough colour added to them, for example the right side of her body is only painted with a few small dots. Therefore making the image look too white and allowing this part of her to blend with the background instead of helping form the outline of the body, if she had added more colour and paint to this her image would look more complete and you would be able to see the detail of the arm that is touching up her make up better.

The principle of design that is shown through this piece of artwork is unity, this is because unity is when a similar background or effect is placed on the entire image to ultimately unify the image as a finishing touch. This is seen through the colours that she uses to show the portrait, this is because all the colours she uses are repeated throughout the piece and therefore if looking quickly it almost seems as if it were a pattern. By making the image match throughout to some extent is unifies the image and that is why it can be under this principle of design.