Aztec Artifacts

I am still waiting for my postcards of Aztec Artifacts to arrive but in the meantime I had a bit of a brainwave and found some of the same images on the internet, so I was able to do some preparatory art work from these instead.  In some ways this is even better because I have found some close up images, enabling me to see even more detail. 

Anyway, I thought I would start with an Aztec mosaic of a two headed serpent. I did some initial sketches, then decided to do a detailed picture of one of of the heads, using a black fine liner and coloured pens. I really loved the bright aqua marine colours and the intricacy of the mosaic work and so did my best to replicate it. Here are a few pictures of my progress: 

The photograph of the serpent that I used

I drew the serpent and added the mosaic detail section by section

I used a black fine liner for the outline

The finished picture

As you can imagine it took quite a long time to colour each mosaic tile individually, but it was quite theraputic!  And I nearly had a disaster when I coloured the background, because I had half an eye on the telly at the same time and nearly coloured over the serpent's top tooth!  Luckily I narrowly avoided disaster and told myself to concentrate on the job in hand.  Overall I am quite pleased with the result and I think that felt tips pens make it quite bold and striking.  (I tested out coloured pencils but they looked too washed out.) 

So next I am going to continue drawing and sketching the artifacts and then take them forward and come up with some designs and experiment with colour.  I also hope to finish my colour theory work very soon; just waiting for Pete to do some sneaky colour printing for me at work.