Ice Breaker: Self Portrait

 During our first Art Portfolio class, we were assigned to create a portrait of ourselves either drawing it or digitally. This term I want to focus on building and developing my drawing skills so I decided to complete this task by drawing my portrait. For my 2D3D task last term we were assigned to create a self-portrait and I completed it using ink pens. Ink pens are a medium I am quite familiar with, therefore, for this task I wanted to challenge myself to create something out of my comfort zone.

Untitled A2C-007 (2018)

This piece of art sparked my idea in todays class task. This was created by Adam Riches. I really like how the artist uses scribbles to form the portrait. He creates dimension and shadows by scribbling intensely in the desired areas. I like this concept and I want to recreate it in my own style by making it more playful, colourful so it can resemble doodles. 

I was really intrigued by this drawing so I wanted to try it out. This style of drawing was very out of my comfort zone as I tend to like drawing thin lines and making everything look tidy.  This was a really quick drawing that took me about 15-20 minutes. 

I wanted to create an abstract piece of work that has scribbles across it. I wanted my piece to resemble a doodle or a cartoon version of myself rather than creating a realistic piece. Ideally, if I had more allocated time to complete this task, I would try out a more realistic version. However, as this was a short ice breaker task, I decided to keep it simple and minimalistic. My aim was to enlarge certain features like the eyes to make it look more cartoonish. A known phrase says 'the eyes are the windows to the soul' which is something I wanted to capture in my design. Additionally, as there will not be a lot of empty white space, enlarging the eyes and keeping them white would make them the focal point so they would stand out. 

Sitting man (n.d)

For my colour palette I was inspired by this 3D effects drawing. The main colours included are turquoise and red. I really like these colours as they complement each other very well. Additionally, they create a blurry effect which creates a unique illusion. I am aware that in order to create this effect you need to place one colour next to the other, however, I decided that I wanted to scribble my colours all over the page. I used this picture as a colour guide which was very helpful as it helped me keep it simple and effective. 

The only highlighters I had home were pink, purple and blue so they were close enough to resemble that colour palette. I used a pink highlighter to form all my basic shapes, then added a purple highlight for dimension and a black ink pen of size 0.5 for details. The pink was used as a base as it was the lightest, therefore it takes up a larger proportion of my drawing as it doesn't stand out much. I also used a blue colour in some areas to create contrast and make it look more colourful. I really like the colour palette created as it looks very cohesive and the colours complement each other. 

I am satisfied with the overall finish for the amount of time it took me to create this. I like exploring new methods and familiarising myself with them so this is definitely a good new start to the second term. I am excited to work on upcoming projects with the same enthusiastic approach. 

The under-eye bags represent the long term effects of sleep deprivation.

After receiving feedback from my tutor, I decided to add colour pencils to the final look to make it look more like Adam Riches' style. I feel like the outcome is much more improved than before.