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