Happy Birthday Mom! (Patreon)

I talk a lot about how great my mom but it never really feels like enough. I'm very broke right now but I wanted to give her something really special. Inspired by the classes I've been watching on skillshare, I decided to paint her portrait. 

I got her some gifts at the Mucha museum last year and then promptly misplaced them. So instead I decided to blatantly rip off his style for a portrait worthy of my mom. Mucha is one of her favorite artists and I've always thought of her as looking like one of his subjects. When I went to his museum, I was really struck by the level of detail in his paintings, and the thought he put into even the smallest parts of his backgrounds and composition.
I wanted to incorporate a number of elements that make me think of my mom. So I started with Mucha's painting of a woman leaning on a dragon. My mom is born in the year of the dragon and collects anything with dragons on it. Since she's a fabric artist, I made the circular background out of patterns that are all sewing related (buttons, dressmaker's dummies, needle and thread.) She's from Hawaii so I changed the flowers to yellow hibiscus because it's Hawaii's state flower. I put her cat Flora on her lap, and gave her a base of books because they're her favorite things in the world. Now that I think about it, I should have added a guitar, but maybe that would have been too cluttered. The rest of the background is stars because of her celestial name.

I came up with this last week so I didn't have much time and I knew that my psycho perfectionist self would never be happy with something I drew from scratch so I cheated a lot. I photoshopped the new elements onto Mucha's original painting (forgive me Mucha)

Then I printed it out and traced out the lines I was keeping and drew in the sewing elements. I scanned that back into photoshop to clean it up a little and copied the sewing elements to create a boarder. Then I printed that out on to cardstock and then watercolored the whole thing and added some glitter with gel pens.

I framed it and put it in the mail but not till yesterday so I'm posting this so she can at least see it on her birthday. I think it came out pretty well. I hope my mom likes it.