Painting To A Theme

I’ve been trying to decide which theme to paint to for my project.  I think I’ve decided to go with reworking famous paintings.  I’ve been looking through my Picasso book to get ideas for style, and I’ve found a lot that I really love.  So I thought about trying to design Old Master paintings in a Picasso style.  The first piece I looked at was Rubens’ Portrait of Susanna Lunden nee Fournment.  I found a drawing of Francoise Gilot by Picasso.  The image is called Head of a Woman.  I really liked the style of it and wondered if I could apply the same style to the Rubens’ painting, so I’ve sketched out my representation of it.

Here’s the original painting by Rubens:

Here is Picasso’s Head of a Woman:

Here’s my representation of Rubens’ painting in sketch format:

It’s just a rough sketch but it gives an idea of what it may look like.  I have to carry out a colour study next.  I’m thinking of going with a monochromatic study in blue.  Blue is my absolute favourite colour, and one thing I love about many of Picasso’s paintings is that he explores the use of blue quite a lot. 

I’m also thinking of painting the Mona Lisa in the style of another Picasso painting – Self Portrait 1972:

I haven’t decided as yet, but I would really like to attempt this.  It all depends on time I guess as this is quite a complicated painting, but fascinating nonetheless.