Marco Mazzoni is an Italian artist who lives and works in Milan, Italy.

His work consists of very delicately drawn faces of women, framed and overlapped with dead butterfly wings, flowers, rabbit ears and webbed frog feet. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan for 4 years. There he was introduced to many different ideas and processes, but did not feel that the school gave him the methods for executing a work of art with these tools. After leaving school, and in a minor act of defiance, he began to work with color pencil in order that His main sources of inspiration come from Italian folklore, particularly from the Sardinians, and the book Malleus Maleficarum, that he describes as a book that tells how the women healers were considered evil. His motivation for his work comes from his desire to give form to what these women did for the society because, especially in Italy, religion deletes the figures of the mothers and the women healers. When it comes to creating his artwork he first does studies from master paintings and his imagination, in order to find an appealing composition. When he is ready to begin, he gets his materials. Mazzoni prefers to use Faber Castell Polychromos colored pencils on Fabriano F4 smooth, 400g paper. He has experimented with painting but he prefers the effects of working with dry media like pencils. He begins with an ivory black and dark sepia chiaroscuro under-drawing. When the detailed under-drawing is finished he layers in the first veil of color which he has chosen from a palette designed for the piece. When he is in the process of glazing he uses a variety of color combinations, such as pink with blue or red with green.

In his experience he has never took into consideration how long it takes him to complete a piece, but he prefers to work 8 to 10 hours a day on a regular basis. Some interesting things to note about Mazzonis images is that they tend take on a circular composition and he rarely completes his drawings of faces with eyes. He feels that eyes are too distracting to the viewer. Without them his subjects remain anonymous and almost as if they were a still life. He prefers not to be thought of as a portrait artist.

References http://hifructose.com/2012/08/07/inside-the-sketchbook-of-artist-marcomazzoni/ http://www.juxtapoz.com/illustration/artist-sixers-with-marco-mazzoni http://bonexpose.com/featured/marco-mazzoni/