Drawing a decade: 1910s

A little while ago I got a brilliant idea - to draw my way through each decade, from the 1910s and onwards. The idea popped into my head after being told in last week's art class that the colour scheme and style of the pastel portrait I was working on looked like something out of the 1930s. And thus a project was born! My plan is to explore the art, style and colour schemes of each decade, and make my very own piece of art based on and inspired by what I've discovered and learned.

A few days ago I had some time to spare, and so I dived head first into my decade project. I started off by spending some time on Pinterest, searching my way through the 1910s. Soon I had a board filled with enough inspiration to get me started - below are the four pictures I ended up using as my main inspiration (the entire 1910s board can be found here):

(Source: Pinterest)

Before I started working on the actual drawing I did a 2-second sketch to see if the idea I had in my head would work on paper. I'm using my very best paper for this project (Canson, 224g/m2, 24x32cm), so I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing: 

I then played around in Photo Booth for a while, snapping pictures of myself to use as reference for the facial features. The final pencil sketch ended up looking like this (a significant improvement from the initial sketch, if I may say so myself): 

I decided on using an art deco pattern I found as background:

… Which made choosing the colour scheme a real dream! I simply used the colours from the pattern - cobalt, purple, gold, mint, light blue, black, orange, burnt orange and red. I also threw in some green for good measure. This is how I store my Promarkers, by the way: 

After the first round of colouring my decade piece looked like this (I love the contrast of the black - maybe it's a colour I should start using more often?): 

And here's the final result!

I'm really happy with my 1910s decade piece, and I can't wait to start working on the roaring 20s! 

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Do you have a favourite decade?