Napoleon Art Nouveau

This design was a happy accident. I stumbled across Aubrey Beardsley's work and was very drawn to his faces. I found something oddly beautiful about them - and wanted to do a 'version' of Napoleon Bonaparte based on this idea of a gorgeously ugly face. This warped into a completely surrealistic idea of him on a horse. After this, I decided I had illustrated his 'id' or his inner truth he felt about himself. This stimulated a series of illustrating the personalities of eccentric historical figures