This piece was created as a combined homage to Albrect Durr's,Rhinoceros as well as the overall style of the artist Gustav Klimt. Albrect Durr was a famous print maker who worked with incredible detail and admirable skill. He created the print Rhinoceros without having ever seen the actual animal himself, drawing from a written description. Considering this, it is amazingly close to the real thing but with a more fantastical twist. It was the strange concentric circle patterning the texture of the hide that inspired Giraffe. Almost accurate but with a larger than realistic head and extended legs, the giraffe is meant to reflect creative accuracy with a whimsical quality. It's spots are layered, like the hide of Durr's rhinoceros, 2 layers of different colors with gold leaf at the centre to add a further element of fantasy.

 

The background was inspired by this use of the gold leaf as it lead to looking at the work of Gustav Klimt who often used gold leaf in his paintings. His paintings are beautiful and share the exaggerated fantastical quality I found in Durr's Rhinoceros. Klimt's backround's are beautiful for their use of detail, and the patterning of colors and shapes. The background in Giraffe was created by adopting his use of breaking up the space into geometric and organic shapes and covering them in different patterns and textures. The burnt orange color used in "Giraffe" was modeled after a similar tone used in Klimt's works and the other colors were matched to it.