Katya Izabel Filmus

Katya Izabel Filmus

Self Portrait (cont)

Just updating with more progress on my self portrait. It still needs some work. I'm not completely happy with the current state of the hair and the trousers and feet need some work, as does the camera arm. Otherwise I'm very happy with it! It all just worked straight away. I've never painted body hair or facial hair or eyebrows and my last attempts at head hair and eyebrows were a dreadful blobby affair.

I have a summer project to finish next which I need to think about planning and completing before I continue with any more painting. I do really want to carry on experimenting with the pattern fields and grids as soon as I can really.

Last year's acrylic self portrait

My almost finished oil painting

Self Portrait in Oil

I spent a couple of days thinking about how to go about a self portrait. I wanted to do something a bit different but at the same time I want to develop my skills and get used to painting people so I was sort of torn between going for something really surreal or stylized or abstracted. I had a look on deviantart but it was mostly either very traditional (sometimes very good though) or very cheesy (but also sometimes very good in that case too!).

I'd taken a few pics of myself from different angles and stuff over the couple of days too and ended up going with one with weird perspective and where I hadn't washed or showered for a like 5 days (I'd been in Leeds getting stoned and going out drinking) and liked how rough I looked. All blotchy and dark around the eyes and the sun was hurting my eyes when I looked up at the camera so I look pretty frowny and strange.

Aaaanyways... Here it is so far... I ended up actually ditching the being clever and interesting with it and just tried to go for a more realistic approach. It's still probably got 10-15 hours work to be done on it, I think... Maybe a bit less. There's still work to do on the basic shading on the face, the nose needs to be slightly less long, I need to do the feet (especially since I have trainers on in the photo and I want bare feet! That'll be a bit awkward to try and fix), shade the trousers, do the background, touch up the arm, paint in my nipple, add some more blotches and odd freckles, finish the hair and shade it and... yeah. It's so much easier than making proper art though. You can just zone out and not think about it at all. Abstract painting is much harder!

09/09/11

08/09/11

07/09/11

A few bits

Decent pic of the finished oil painting

This is a barbarian/viking thing. I'm not sure he knows what he's supposed to be.

More experimentation

Finished oil practice

This actually turned out really well! I blocked in a load of white for a lot of the background which gave it a bit of a cheesy dream sequence feel but I really wanted to get it done so I could exhibit it at the Abbey. I'm not sure whether it's cool to exhibit wet paintings... :S I've taped it to the back of another canvas so only the edges will get fucked during transport and I can give them a rough touch up with oils when I get to Leeds. It'll be reet.

Anyway. Here it is. It's a shit blurry picture but the light is terrible again because it's night time. :/ I'll snap it again in Leeds tomorrow morning. :)