New Year, New Projects!

berthe morisot portrait

Happy New Year! Whether celebrating or sleeping through it, I hope we get an amazing start this year. The bar may be low, but we can clear it!

Now that the holiday season is over, some of us will be making resolutions and plans while others will be saying to hell with it all. I did a post last year about all the stuff I was going to do. I’m not going to go back and read it because I don’t think I made it very far into my plan… 

This year will be different! Maybe. At least there will be more of a plan? 

At any rate, it’s something I’ve talked about on stream here and there and I’m super excited about it! Are you ready? We are doing: 

Artist of the Month!

(pause for effect)

I know right?? For each month this year I’ve picked an artist born in that month. I’m going to put my Art History degree to work and write up a little something about each artist. 

But wait! There’s more! Don’t worry, I’m not gonna make you *just* read and learn stuff. 

There will also be a project for each artist of the month where I make a piece related to their work, whether it be in their style, a similar subject matter, or maybe a portrait of the artist. 

To kick of the new year, we’re going to start with French artist Berthe Morisot. She was a pioneer of Impressionist art during a time when women were still heavily constrained by social norms. Her contributions have only begun to be truly recognized in the past few years – more than 100 years after her untimely death. 

berthe morisot portrait

Photo of Berthe Morisot. Source: Wikipedia

I plan to paint a digital portrait in the impressionist style using a custom color set and custom brushes to capture the dynamic strokes and colorful shading that helped define the style. 

It was hard to choose artists for the list because there are so many directions to take a project like this. I ultimately decided to pick names that people may recognize without going so big that’s it’s been done to death. Sorry, Van Gogh. Not sorry Picasso. Maybe we’ll talk about them another time. Maybe someday I’ll be able to do more than one each month (that’d be so cool!). 

January is Berthe Morisot month. I’ll talk about her more in the next post and do another after the project is done. I’m pretty sure I know what I want the painting to be, but I’m not going to say yet. You’ll have to tune in to see. 

Thank you for reading. Thank you for going on this little adventure with me. I can’t wait to see how this turns out!