Musical Composer Portraits-- Commission

During this past summer, I had the pleasure of working on a commission for my awesome cousin. She just started teaching music at a Junior High, and she wanted some art to put on the walls of her new classroom.  She asked me to create portraits of some of her favorite composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

First I gathered quite a few reference photos online. I looked up existing portraits (or photographs in the case of Tchaikovsky) of the four men, as well as clothing styles/fabrics/colors/etc. from the time and place in which each man lived.  I then used this reference material to create portrait drawings. My style started out as more realistic, but my cousin preferred a simpler, more cartoon look (which ended up being perfect), so I drew them again.  After getting her approval on the final designs, I scanned the drawings onto the computer and used Adobe Photoshop to redraw them digitally, color them, and add textures to the fabrics.

I had a couple ideas for ways to make the backgrounds more interesting and personalized.  I asked my cousin what her favorite pieces of music are by each composer, and I overlayed the sheet music for those scores to create the background for each portrait. Then I found pictures of the composers' actual signatures and used those to create the name plates.

I am so happy with how these turned out! It was such a fun project to work on, and I felt like I was really able to show my style and abilities.