portrait of Charles Darwin

16 november 2012

Classified in : Artworks

( a higher resolution on deviantART here )

This is a personnal tribute. I started studying more about Charles Darwin carreer and impact on science while reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. Good book. So, I wanted to paint a portrait, using many species as brushes, ordering them in pseudo branching... and I failed to be consistent or exact about branching and decided to fall into more a sort of symbolic branching. Art have this advantage to keep a part of poetry.
Still, the task was hard, and a real puzzle game with many rules of color values and colors temperature to respect to keep contributing to the global portrait. Certainly better could be made but I decided to stop detailing it or fixing it. I didn't want to start loosing energy of stokes and first intention.
Note : It ended to a familiar rendering like the famous portraits of Giuseppe Arcimboldo ( I loved those portrait in my childhood, not really now, maybe they came back unconsciously ).

"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."
- Charles Darwin

Painted with Krita 2.7-Pre-alpha (in developpement) on Linux Mint KDE 13.

Charles Darwin on Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Reposting and usage of the artwork is free, allowed and encouraged, providing credits "Artwork : www.davidrevoy.com" but any usage of the artwork for commercial purposes or manipulations, derivations are strictly prohibited.

Classified in : Artworks

blog post by David Revoy

9 comments

1. Brett McCoy

friday 16 november 2012, 18:44

This is excellent!

2. lewatoto

saturday 17 november 2012, 01:25

Amazing!!!!

3. Jiri

saturday 17 november 2012, 08:57

Great image!

4. Tepee

saturday 17 november 2012, 18:32

C'est magnifique, j'en suis bouche-bée.
Un seul mot, bravo.

5. steeve

saturday 17 november 2012, 21:03

trop cool ! l'inspiration était au rendez vous.

6. sage

sunday 18 november 2012, 21:56

Clearly, Giuseppe Arcimboldo was the first thing that came to my mind. But for a "Arcimboldo-like" artwork, it's a very clever one (as well of course as a very well made).

Would have been the best cover ever for the book « Sur les épaules de Darwin » by Jean-Claude Ameisen (book made from the weekly radio show of the same name).

7. Matou

monday 19 november 2012, 10:45

I really like the gradation from the first water species on earth at the bottom of the beard to the apparition of mammals on the top of his head! Very nice, and very well executed!

8. andrew

wednesday 05 december 2012, 20:58

amazing pictures, but book is superficial and can impress people who are not deep interested in the idea of God

9. Francesco

monday 10 december 2012, 17:37

emmm... great David, really amazing and i love Charles

David Revoy

portrait of Charles Darwin

9 comments

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