{"id":612,"date":"2012-01-16T20:24:11","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T01:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/?p=612"},"modified":"2013-04-11T21:00:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-12T01:00:20","slug":"guernica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/2012\/01\/guernica\/","title":{"rendered":"Guernica Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 2008 I moved into a new condo and wanted to make something really cool out of it. I batted around a few ideas for a mural to paint on the living room wall, but one thing was certain: it needed to be\u00a0big<\/em>. I had just painted a mural for a local community center and was riding high on some new-found confidence in my painting ability. I’ve always been more into drawing, liking the control of pencil and ink over messy brushes and paint.<\/p>\n

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Picasso’s Guernica became the project. To recreate the modern art masterpiece. Breaking down the original into little pieces\u2014like a mechanic taking apart a car, seeing how it all fits together, and then building it back up\u2014was an amazing process.<\/p>\n

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From Wikipedia<\/a>: “Guernica<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0is a painting by\u00a0Pablo Picasso. It was created in response to the\u00a0bombing of Guernica,\u00a0Basque Country, by\u00a0German\u00a0and\u00a0Italian\u00a0warplanes\u00a0at the behest of the Spanish\u00a0Nationalist\u00a0forces, on 26 April 1937, during the\u00a0Spanish Civil War. The\u00a0Spanish Republican\u00a0government commissioned Picasso to create a large\u00a0mural\u00a0for the Spanish display at the\u00a0Paris International Exposition\u00a0at the\u00a01937 World’s Fair\u00a0in Paris.\u00a0Guernica<\/em>\u00a0shows the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians. This work has gained a monumental status, becoming a perpetual reminder of the tragedies of war, an\u00a0anti-war\u00a0symbol, and an embodiment of peace. On completion\u00a0Guernica<\/em>\u00a0was displayed around the world in a brief tour, becoming famous and widely acclaimed. This tour helped bring the\u00a0Spanish Civil War\u00a0to the world’s attention.”<\/p>\n

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A look at my process recreating Picasso’s Guernica…<\/em><\/p>\n

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Picasso’s original artwork<\/h1>\n

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PLANNING<\/h1>\n

To make it simple I distilled the original painting down in Photoshop to black, white, and a few shades of gray. I added the extra bit on the left to fill out the rest of the wall on the other side of a doorway.<\/p>\n

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An outlines-only version was made into a transparency and projected onto the wall. The little green boxes show where wall sockets are. The grid helped to position the image\u00a0precisely.<\/p>\n

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My apartment, primed and ready. My crappy old couch. I borrowed the overhead projector from my sister, a public school teacher. It’s handy to know people.<\/p>\n

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PRE-VISUALIZATION<\/h1>\n

Along with the mural itself, it was quite a task to design the apartment around the painting. I created these pre-visualizations in Photoshop to see what worked and what didn’t. Colours and graphics (like the TV, speakers and Guernica itself) were superimposed over shots of the empty apartment.<\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-101\"<\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-102\"<\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-103\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-104\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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STRIPES, STRIPES, STRIPES…<\/h1>\n

I settled on the last colour scheme. The stripes were almost as difficult to pull of as the mural; some parts of the apartment aren’t perfectly parallel, I regretfully discovered. Where one doorway stood at 90\u00b0, the next one might have been at 91\u00b0. I had to gradually angle the lines for it to mesh nicely. A mountain of tape was used to mask off the lines when it came time to paint.<\/p>\n

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TONAL BREAKDOWN<\/h1>\n

Here’s a look at the tonal separations I had made in Photoshop. I painted one tone at a time, starting with pure black, all the way up to pure white. Since the whole thing was going to take a while I picked up some air-tight Rubbermaid containers from Home Depot. The gray tones were premixed (from two huge tubs of white and black acrylic paint) into these containers.<\/p>\n

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PAINTING<\/h1>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-105\"<\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-106\"<\/p>\n

\"Guernica_Multi-107\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"Guernica_Multi-108\"<\/p>\n

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FINISHED<\/h1>\n

Another look at the finished mural. A coat of matte varnish was added to take the shine off and protect it from weathering.<\/p>\n

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A PILGRIMAGE<\/h1>\n

In September 2009 I was in Barcelona to see the ADCC World Championships<\/a>. I hopped on a plane over to Madrid with the express purpose of getting a look at the real deal in person. It’s currently at the\u00a0Museo Reina Sof\u00eda<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Thanks for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2008 I moved into a new condo and wanted to make something really cool out of it. I batted around a few ideas for a mural to paint on the living room wall, but one thing was certain: it needed to be\u00a0big. I had just painted a mural for a local community center and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[88,91,90,86,84,89,87,85],"class_list":["post-612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-bts","tag-eric","tag-guernica","tag-madrid","tag-painting","tag-photoshop","tag-picasso","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=612"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/612\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ericyu.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}