Portrait painting: Jakob Muffel (watercolor after Dürer)

Image Description

This portrait painting shows the Nuremberg councilman Jakob Muffel. The template of this image comes from Albrecht Dürer. I painted it with colored dots. This kind of contemporary painting I call Neo-Pointilism. Here, a face is broken down into its color values, which I then mix as accurately as possible with watercolor paint in the respective size on the paper as a dot.

Watercolor is particularly well suited for this process, because I can not only mix the color quality, but also control the color intensity on the paper well via the amount of water. I can use it to paint light areas very brightly, luminous dots correspondingly color-intensive, and dark areas especially darkened by repeated glazing. The result is a lively portrait.

The effect of the image, however, is the opposite of what one is used to. While with conventional images you gain an increasingly sharp impression of the image as you get closer to the original portrait, here it's the other way around: the closer you get to the image, the less clear it becomes. From a viewing distance of about 1-2 meters, you actually only see colored dots that somehow remind you of color vision tests. However, the further you step back (or squint your eyes), the more the image becomes a lifelike portrait. The better you know the person portrayed - and thus have a visual image of the person in your head - the more similar and recognizable the portrait becomes.

Since the question keeps coming, couldn't I do this much better and more accurately using a digital process? No, because that is not the ARt of images that I aspire to. My painting lives from the mistakes. Since errors cannot be planned, but occur by chance, no algorithm can simulate this kind of painting. Because planned mistakes are no mistakes. Of course, no point on the portrait is really round - they are all painted freehand and insofar imperfect. But that is precisely my attitude in the digital age: there are images that no machine could produce. Painting is being human.

I also offer this kind of contemporary portrait painting as a service: if you are interested in such a picture, please contact me (data see imprint).

Video with this image

The following video shows the painting process as a time-lapsed video.

"Portrait painting: Jakob Muffel (watercolor after Dürer)", Speed painting, digital painting (Photoshop, Grafiktablett)

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Portrait painting: Jakob Muffel (watercolor after Dürer) | Watercolor by Martin Missfeldt