For my self portrait project I had a the idea to make an image of myself, digitally, comprised of multiple images from my past. This would include: childhood photos, old artwork/drawings, images from the internet of interests, photos of family and friends, etc. Overall, every image would have some sort of resonance with me. The idea behind this was that, I am a product of the places and people I’ve interacted with, and the experiences I’ve gone through. I was also lightly influenced by Gestalt theory; the idea that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
I knew I wanted to execute my vision digitally, as I feel I am quite skilled in digital media (Photoshop), and I wanted an element of precision that I thought I could only reach in a digital format.
My first step was to use Photoshop to simply crop and frame an existing image of myself. I then “posterized” the image, which separated it into chunks of different shades/values/levels of lighting. I then took this image into Illustrator and traced around each of these shapes of differing values. I finished this step and thought the rest of the project would run like clockwork, as it was simply a matter of filling the shapes with some photos. The remainder of the project actually took much, much longer than expected, and for a few reasons.
The first aspect was my technical issues. I had a hard drive of all my [family’s] old photos and planned on using those for a majority of my project. However the hard drive didn’t work with my computer and I was forced to use my personal stock of photos (which is much less extensive) and the internet. Looking back on this, I like the idea of me having to be resourceful and “scavenge” for photos wherever I could, but in the moment it added to my stress level. I think the project turned out well as is, and the older photos may have taken the place of a few photos, but it wouldn’t have made a huge aesthetic difference, and only a small difference in the emotional background of the project.
The second hiccup was due to the way I had drawn the shapes. Through a combination of my method of tracing and the way in which I was forced to trace, I had a lot of lines that were “free-standing” (so to speak). They didn’t form an enclosed shape that I could drop a photo into. This made it much more difficult to simply drag-and-drop as I had planned. However, with some layering and tweaking of the shapes, I was able to figure out a process of inserting images, and eventually got a very good handle on the procedure.
Overall I am very pleased with the way it turned out. Due to the nature of my project, it was hard to tell what the end product would look like before working on it, but I was happy with the visual image I was left with. There is a variety of color and interesting shapes throughout, which encourages you to explore the image.
If I could do this project a second time, I would spend more time on the layout of the images. While I was assembling the project, I gave some thought as to what images would go where, based on their content or personal importance. However I would’ve liked to do this more formally and with the use of the hard drive of images I had planned on using. I would’ve also made an attempt to replicate the shades/value of each shape in the original image of my face. In my opinion, the final image of myself is slightly obscure, specifically around the mouth and nose area. I think this is due to the high number of shapes used to create that region and the intricacy of the images used within it. Those two factors sort of compete and make the lips, nose, etc. hard to make out, in my opinion.
You can view a full-sized version of the project here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7weptrbrfs5i1pn/self%20portrait.pdf?dl=0
