Week 5 | Colour Portraits| Images 16-20
self-portrait 5 ways
Original Portrait photograph
Image 16: Swatches of Self
Medium: 2B pencil, Acrylic paint
Technique: Sketching, Acrylic painting, swatches
Process: Initially I began this process by sketching the outline of my face on the paper using an image of myself as a reference. I began painting the background with one colour and then moved onto the face using one colour and waiting for it to dry before moving on to the next colour. The process of layering the paint produced a texturised final painting, and the use of a simple primary colour palette and mixing paints with white and black to lighter and darker areas simultaneously, created a bright final product.
Reflection: This piece was a good reflection of my personal favourite style of painting. It is abstract in its nature although I struggled when painting the eyes and mouth on the face, and making the portrait appear as though it was from an angle rather than a straight on painting, like the original image. The vibrant colours work well together and stand out to create a captivating painting and I am satisfied with the result.
Image 17: Staines
Medium: 2B pencil, watercolour paint, fine line pen, watercolour paper (300gsm)
Technique: Sketching, water colour painting, wet wash and fine line drawing.
Process: I began this process by lightly sketching the main shapes of my face on watercolour paper. I then followed this by applying water to different areas where I had drawn the face and hair and used a wet wash technique by applying colours to the damp areas of the page using a wet wash technique to allow the colours to bleed. The colours are analogous, created using the complimentary colours, blue and red and mixing them to create purples. Green was also created to contrast this, and all the colours were lightened with white or darkened with black to achieve different shades. I enjoyed how the paint stains the page and bleeds beyond the fine line pen outlines creating the main shapes of the face.
Reflection: Creating this portrait was a new style of painting that I would like to develop further. I like how there is minimal detail in the painting, the main areas of the face are drawn, and the watercolour highlights these areas. I struggled a little with the control of the paints however enjoyed the process of having the freedom to allow the paint to react and flow ed freely on the page.
Image 18: Self Expression
Medium: Collage, magazine paper, photocopy paper
Technique: Collation of magazine cut out images glued to original black and white photograph of self-portrait.
Process: Creating this piece was interesting as I searched through multiple magazines to find images to best represent myself and how I was feeling on this day with some added creativity and colour. I began with the original self-portrait on photocopy paper in black and white, and used my eyes from the same image in colour and attached it to the page. I then accumulated pages from magazines that best suited the black, white and warm colour scheme. This best reflected the chaos of my busy uni schedule during the week, hence the numerous words in the background in different orientations, and multiple hands distorted on the page.
Reflection: This was a very fun task, and I really enjoyed playing with black and white and contrasting it with colour to stand out. Moreover, creating a distorted self-portrait to explain how I was feeling rather than a literal painting of myself was challenging to explore.
Image 18: Illustrated Self
Medium: digital, Illustrator
Technique: Graphic illustrations using Illustrator
Process: This process was very new to me as I haven’t used illustrator much in the past, but I’m quite impressed with the result. The original photograph was imported into illustrator and I used the image trace tool to outline the major shapes of the image in black and white. I then used the curvature tool to outline the features of the face and changed the colours using a repeated colour palette. Playing around with the tools to show the curves of the hair and face has a large impact on the image, and the use of gradients also adds dimension to the image.
Reflection: This piece was one of my favourites when creating the self-portraits, as I usually like to focus on the details of the face, and I was forced to keep it quite minimal. Not only was this a challenge, but I learned that minimalism can also result in an effective final work, when attention is payed to certain areas. Selecting which areas contained which colours was also time consuming, and if I were to repeat this work, I would use my knowledge of the curve tool to create cleaner lines and focus on where the colours are placed in order to add dimension to the 2D image.
Image 20: Tri coloured self
Medium: Multi coloured cardboard paper
Technique: Stencilled, cut out and glued cardboard paper, layering.
Process: I cut out the original image of myself and cut it up into sections to make up the main pieces of the work that I envisioned. I then used these sections like puzzle pieces and stencilled them onto the coloured cardboard and cut them out and stuck them onto a background piece of cardboard. I placed complimentary colours orange and blue against one another and used the yellow to break them up for a more interesting appeal.
Reflection: This minimalistic composition of cut out cardboard may be my least favourite of the weekly portraits. I pushed the boundaries of experimenting with minimalist and pushed my comfort zones with cutting due to cardboard being a higher fidelity to regular magazine of photocopy paper which I used in the past portraits. I am however satisfied with the colour palette as I believe they complement each other well and are vibrant to the viewer.
#oneperday19 | DVB102 | Assessment 1
