Back in April (2019), I watched a series called "Celebrity Painting Challenge" (on iPlayer) and felt inspired to try my hand at a self-portrait - a subject I usually do my best to avoid, people but especially myself. For college, I had to do a series of self portraits using different techniques; and I think it's fair to say that none of these looked like me... More recently I tried to sketch my younger sister - that drawing looked quite like me... go figure!
After deciding to have myself looking over my shoulder, I had my sister take a photo which I then turned into black and white using the settings on my phone. I used the photo to zoom in and get a much closer look at lines and details which I think gave a much better result. However, I hadn't quite got the head-shape right, but after fixing that my self-portrait was slowly becoming something I could be proud of.
I wanted to use drawing ink to create a grey-scale self-portrait and decided to only put colour in my eye to create a dramatic and almost haunting image.
To bring out the colour in my eye, I decided to use a pen (which was as close in colour as I could get to the green I used for my eye) to write the words for the background. I felt these words should be positive AND negative thoughts and feelings, along with some quotes that I find inspiring. I also chose to write the words fairly small and close together so that, like thoughts and feelings, the viewer would only be able to see them when they were close to me/my portrait.
So, when I was happy with the "me" part of my self-portrait, I started writing the thoughts/feelings on the canvas (starting in the top left corner). I had done about 2, maybe 3, inches square when... the pen stopped working! Since the pen I was using was from a set, I didn't think I would be able to buy it on its own so I put my self-portrait on hold until I either found the correct pen on its own or figured out a way to use different colours/shades to do the rest of the writing. (Unfortunately I didn't take a photo at this stage).
Fast forward 5 or 6 months and I really wanted to get it finished. I looked up the website for the pen company to find out if they sold them separately - and they do! We ordered two so that this time I would have a spare and waited for them to arrive... When they did, I tested my new pens on a piece of paper alongside the old one to check they were all the same colour and guess what - they weren't! So again I put it on hold until I figured out what to do.
Now about 7 months after starting, I finally decided to do a sort of diagonal zig-zag gradient using more shades of green. But hold-up - it's almost December and I have decorations I want to make and other projects that have a much closer deadline!
Happy New Year! Started a Bullet Journal! One of my Goals - finish Self-Portrait and keep blog up-to-date! (Shall we see how long that lasts?)
Two weeks later - after BuJo set-up, late Christmas present deliveries (sorry friends), and two birthdays - I finally got back to my self-portrait.
I continued writing the words in one of the new pens and as I wrote more and more, I noticed the colour was getting darker... until it actually matched the original pen colour! Back to plan A - all background/words in one colour! Yay!
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| Photo taken on day 2 of 3 |
And after working on it for three days - IT'S FINISHED!!!! I'm soooo happy with this - even the little mistakes work well, as it is supposed to be really personal and I think they make it more realistic/relatable - nobody is perfect, right?
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"Self-Analysis"
50x60cm
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I am really proud of my self-portrait and I hope maybe it'll inspire others to have a go and put your own spin on it.
Please leave a comment below - I'd love to hear your opinions and if you think you'll have a go at doing your own self-portrait...
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