The Old Guitarist is Picasso’s most well-known piece from his Blue Period.

Picasso’s Blue Period was prompted by his close friend, Carlos Casagemas, who committed suicide in early 1901. In the following three years, Picasso’s paintings started to fill with blues and greens, solitary figures, blind men, and gaunt women with children. The blue period started only seven years after his painting career started. The depressing and melancholy nature of his paintings deterred buyers from these particular works.

My graphic design journey started in my first year of high school. Despite learning the ropes of programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, I am still very proud of the work I produced during this time. This is largely thanks to my graphic design teacher, Neal Von Flue, whose projects pushed me to think deeply about the art I was creating, he remains one of my biggest sources of inspiration. Neal, like myself, traverses multiple mediums and often combines them. For this project, he challenged the class to recreate a classic painting without the use of tracing, the only reference we were allowed to use was a printed photo of (in my case) The Old Guitarist.

Because of this, I wanted to use a drawing method that would be forgiving of inaccuracies. I decided that using this scribbling method would be a good way to draw this figure and build layers.