Outcome

Paul Klee was an artist who used cubism, surrealism, and expressionism in his art. Though he didn’t focus mainly on one theme when producing his work, he implemented color theory in his artwork, and because he admired children’s artwork, aimed to incorporate similar styles. He never tried to make his art complicated, and because he was a musician himself, he also on occasion would visually represent music with his art. He often used symbols in his creations, such as geometric symbols or musical symbols.

Klee was very experimental with his work. He didn’t stick to one medium when he created his art; he explored different methods such as watercolor, ink, spray paint, and many others. By not sticking to conventional methods when making art, Klee made advances in abstract art and what was considered to be art. In his later years, Klee developed a fatal disease that impacted his art style. He began to create darker and more depressing art, with thick lines and less varying colors. While he focused a lot on color variation in the past, this changed in the years before his death.

I chose to reproduce Eros, because Klee painted it in his prime years, before he changed his style because of his disease. I like the geometric simpleness of Eros as well as the blend of the colors that show color tonality, which Klee used as a style. Colors blend from dark to light, and there are even arrows pointing upward. Eros, meaning love in Greek, is also the name of the Greek god of love, the son of Aphrodite. He was known to use arrows to make people fall in love, and there are arrows in this piece of art. Klee incorporated arrows into some of his other artworks as well.

Eros contains many triangles within each other, as well as two arrows pointing upward, one of which is aligned with the corner of one of the triangles. The center of the triangles are light in color, and as the triangles become bigger in size, the color becomes darker until reaching the edge, at which it becomes black.

When I first saw this image, I was immediately drawn to it because of the blending of the colors from light to dark. I also like Klee’s use of lines to create simple shapes, each of which had a distinct color. Also, although I say light to dark, I don’t mean white to black necessarily, because that creates an image of going through different shades of gray. Instead of using gray, Klee used vibrant mellow colors such as blue, yellow, and red to go from light to dark. There are two arrows pointing up, which I wasn’t sure about, but may be related to the fact that Eros is the Greek god of love who used arrows to make people fall in love. But Klee used arrows in multiple of his artworks, so he may just have used them to add to the geometry of the painting.

I reproduced Klee’s Eros by first outlining the shapes of the triangles using gray lines, and then making the black arrows. I then proceeded to take colors from the original artwork and fill in the parts of the outline that I had created with those colors. I didn’t realize that outlining the shapes with gray lines in the beginning would make my replica much different from the original, so I decided to get rid of the lines by blending the colors of adjacent shapes together. I applied a paper texture when I had finalized the colors and shapes to mimic the texture of the original artwork.

I learned that creating digital art is very difficult. It might have been easier to replicate Eros by using a more traditional medium. Because I used a paper texture, it darkened most of the colors I had taken from the original, so my replica looks generally darker, and the color differences between the lighter and the darker colors are not as noticeable.

While creating my replica, I was more focused on trying to get all the details correct. If I were to do things differently, I would try to focus more on how Klee felt when he was creating Eros, and his reasons behind doing so. I was more concerned with making my reproduction exactly the same as Klee’s, which is not the best mindset to have when creating a piece of art. I believe I did capture the style somewhat correctly, because there are color contrasts and geometric shapes, but the geometric shapes are not sharp on the edges due to my blending of the colors. As for the themes, I don’t think I managed to show them fully, because the colors were darker than usual, so the difference between light and dark was not as prominent.