For this project, I chose Jean-Michel Basquiat as my inspiration. The way he used colors and "played" with different shapes caught my attention. Most of his artwork includes subjects using different types of weapons, crowns, skeletons, many many skulls and overall a messy styling given that he focused in neo-liberalism and also in street art. Nowadays, his paintings are very famous with prices that start around $2 million dollars. In fact, there was an auction in 2017 by Sotheby's (famous for auctioning high-level and very expensive articles such as art, jewelry and cars) in which one of his paintings reached almost $111 million dollars which in 2023 stands for around $1,948,971,300 Mexican pesos.

I tried to combine multiple aspects of his paintings such as putting my arms wide open (yes, that is me in the picture). This idea for the arms is shown in some of his paintings, such as "Ribs Ribs, 1982" and "Fallen Angel, 1981". Clearly I had to show some weapons just like he did with "The Ring, 1981" and "Red Warrior, 1982". Furthermore, I liked the style of "Baby Boom, 1982" with the blue and some red so here is the reason why I came to the idea of this portrait:

The subject had to be dangerous, let's be honest, clowns are scary and if they are armed it is a clear reason to run. The red and blue background resemble the colors of the police. Wearing a mask of IT the clown, a hammer and a butcher's knife, my purpose was to portray fear. Furthermore, I was inspired by the last scene of the film "The Joker, 2019" where the protagonist stands on top of a police vehicle to show his power and leadership.

To achieve all of these, photoshop and lightroom were the two software I used. Tools such as brushes, lasso tool, selection tool, and adjustments such as hue/saturation, exposure and color grading where used in PS. On the other hand, vectorizing and image tracing were used in AI.