 Hey guys and welcome back to The Average. I'm Steph, I'm The Average Artist. If you're new here, welcome and if you're an old buddy of mine, welcome back. Today I am doing the Draw This In Your Style challenge type video that I did similarly before where I took that Draw This In Your Style thing that was going around a while ago and instead of drawing a social media artist type piece I wanted to draw the old greats and I started out with Klimt in my last video so if you haven't seen that go check that out. But today I'm going to be drawing a Frida Kahlo's piece which is what I found in the water and basically the reason I'm doing this is because I think it's important to study other artists and especially old greats and figure out what makes them good. I also like to do this piece because it's studying the artists and why they're famous and important reasons of art history and I like discussing that and showing you guys who my favorite artists are. So yeah, that's that's why. And this is Frida Kahlo. You probably heard of her. She's a famous Mexican painter. Before we start, side note, I burnt my thumb pretty badly last week so I apologize for the disgusting state that it's in but that's something that if you want to see this video you just have to kind of have to deal with and I apologize because it's gross but you know it's more painful for me than it is for your eyes, okay? So there we go, yeah. Anyway, let's start. Frida Kahlo was a artist born in Mexico City, Mexico in 1907. She was very famous for her work with post-colonialism, gender class and race in Mexican society. Studies and identity within her pieces so each piece that she does it sends a message and it has personal meaning to her a lot of the time behind it. So she does a lot of modern arts, surrealism, magical realism, symbolism, naturalism, social realism, cubism. She does a whole mix of stuff and I think to discover Frida's artwork instances, discover her as a person because I think that she put herself in every single painting that she did. She was known very much for her self-portraits and a lot of some of her surrealist work where she paints about pain. I think that is a common theme in all her paintings is the pain in her life which she had gone through. When she was a child she suffered from polio and then when she was 18 she was in a horrible bus accident which rendered her incapacitated and she broke her spine and it left her in bed for a long time so she has a lot of pain from that. It's a pretty horrific accident and she was lucky to be alive but unlucky to have been in such a horrible situation and a lot of this pain that she has because she suffered from chronic pains she puts into her paintings. You see a lot of symbolism in this piece that I am drawing today. You see symbolism of works about colonialism where she wanted Mexico to be a country about Mexico instead of all these other places that I took over were influencing their culture upon the place so she wanted it to be more like it was before those times so a lot of that is referenced in this piece that I'm drawing. I don't really know I couldn't pinpoint every little thing that is in this image and tell you what it means. I think that's what's interesting about Frida's work is that when you look at it you can see and interpret different things and if you know something about her life maybe you can assume that that's what she meant by these things. She was married to a famous muralist called Diego Riviera and he was a more famous artist than her at the time so she sort of followed his career path around and at one point they went to New York and he drew a big portrait there and basically she hated being in the USA. She was very homesick so a lot of her work includes stuff from her home and in this in this image you can see I think it's the Empire State building is sort of in a volcano and the volcano is erupting around the Empire State and I don't think that's supposed to mean that she hates the USA as I've read online and that the volcano represents Mexico swallowing up the USA. I think it's more to do with her emotional state where she's homesick so the volcano is kind of her emotions and feelings of her country eating up anything like magical or inspiring about the USA is probably these giant buildings and things she's probably like that's nothing compared to my natural home and I miss that and that's how I interpret that anyway and there's lots of things within this piece that can be interpreted different ways and I'm sure if she was alive today she would tell us what for and tell us what is what and if we're wrong or right about certain things but unfortunately she's not and I bet there is a documentation about what everything means so if you're more interested in knowing what all this stuff in these paintings means then go look that up on the internet I'm sure there's lots of helpful advice but yeah that's basically Frieda she was a very outspoken brave person and a lot of people consider her a hero not for what she's done but just because she would speak up for what she thought was right at the time and I think she's a person and a woman to admire and I particularly love this work because I just like the abstractness of it and I like to think of her in the bath looking down at her feet and seeing all these things popping up out of the water because I really like taking baths and I've drawn like lots of images and baths and things and I think things are really relaxing place and a really reflective place so I think that's why she drew this painting and I had a lot of fun doing this painting too it was great I was a little bit intimidated to begin with I've left out a couple of things kind of intentionally within the piece just because it's a lot of work but I kept in the things that I like drawing and I just wanted to have fun with it really because at the end of the day I think it's important to study other artists work just to see how they do things and get it into your creative library in your brain and figure out how people study things and maybe you can put that into your own work somehow and reflect on it and I think that's really frowned upon today they're like oh don't copy my work but I think it's important to copy other people's work and styles obviously don't be like this is mine but say I've copied this this is somebody's work this is not my original work and you learn a lot from that and I think even Frida probably copied a lot of people's work back in the day and didn't show anyone I think most people do that that's how you learn guys it's how you learn yeah so about the process I used watercolors which is obviously different to I think oils is what Frida would have used but I don't use oils they very much intimidate me so I've never used those and yeah I just had fun with this piece it was really great to see all the little images and finding things within the painting that I wouldn't probably have seen unless I was studying it and I liked doing it in watercolors because I felt like I kept adding layers and as I added layers I liked it more and more and it kind of it went a bit away from her realistic style of painting and more to my watercolor kind of style so I like that incorporated what she would do with my own sort of thing and I hope you guys like it really I suggest you guys go and have a look at Frida's work you probably know about her she has a film about herself which is a really good film if you're interested to know more about her then go give that a watch but yeah in general I think most people probably know Frida this is no no no new thing to anybody but it's just something that I wanted to explore and talk about and show you guys so I hope you liked it that's it basically guys that's the final painting and let me know what you think and maybe let me know if there's another artist that you would like to see or somebody you think that I could maybe learn from or know of who you think I might not know of because so far I've done really famous artists so Clint and now Frida so those two artists I think everybody kind of knows about I'd have to have a look in my books my books to see if there's anybody else that I wanted to learn about and yeah that's it so thanks for watching guys please like and subscribe for more content and I will see you next time bye I'd also like to give a short shout out if you don't mind to my favorite patrons they are the 12 dollar tier patrons and they are Erika, James, Cecile, Steph and Lee, Tim, Tom, Miguel, Megan and Babbitt if you guys would like a shout out at the end of my video then go check out my patreon link down below and yeah that's it cheers and bye