Digital Self-Portraits

This project involved us creating front and profile view portraits of ourselves and then transferring them into Adobe Illustrator wherein we would abstract them to produce a final work that was representative of our personality.

Final Work

Below are images of the two final digital self-portraits I created.

 

This diptych of portraits were both inspired by the qualities that this year, and this semester of learning online have taught me to develop, and consequently the symbolism in each work reflects this idea. The first portrait (Self Portrait 1 – Growth) emphasises the qualities of growth and adaptability. This year has necessitated that we all learn how to be flexible and to deal with new challenges as and when they arise. Hence to represent this, I integrated symbols of plants – whose growth patterns evolve as their environments evolve – and water – an element of nature that is constantly in flux – into the background of my piece. In the second portrait (Self Portrait 2 – Resilience) I wanted to highlight the qualities of resilience and determination. The events of this year have made it feel easier than ever to want to give up and succumb to feelings of sadness or demotivation, but over the course of the last few months, I have learnt the importance of pushing myself to do my best despite the circumstances. In representing this I integrated the symbols of cacti that keep growing despite the harshest environmental conditions, and the sun, which is the most persistent of nature’s elements. 

In both works, I chose to use organic lines (detail shown in the image below) to create almost a suggestion of a portrait (as some features on my face are represented and others are left to the viewers’ imagination) as I wanted to convey the idea that I myself am constantly changing, and a single portrait cannot really capture mine, or for that matter anyone else’s true nature, as there will always be blanks that cannot be filled. Finally, while my colour choice was mostly arbitrary as I simply wanted to select a colour scheme that would look appealing to a viewer as well as represent the symbols in my work well, I did stick to a relatively minimal palette to create a sense of cohesion between the two pieces.

Challenges and Surprises

A challenge that I faced in creating this work was how difficult it was to decide on a style of art of a process of creating these portraits that I felt was an appealing as well as “accurate” reflection of my personality. I enjoy abstracting aspects of reality, hence I expected that this project would be similarly enjoyable in the sense that I would have a number of ideas I could narrow down to choose the best one. However when it came time to working on the piece, I was at a loss for which techniques I could use to reflect myself in my art. While I eventually settled on the above style (admittedly after much trial and error) even then I felt like I hadn’t truly captured my personality or ideas in these images. It is at this point that I decided to remove a number of lines in the piece to create the blank space that I felt represented the sense of dynamism that I wanted to convey.

A surprise I encountered was in how much fun it was to experiment with colour in this project. While I did stick to a minimal colour palette as I often do in my works, I worked with colours that are very bright and complementary in nature which is something that I am quite hesitant to do, so I was happy to try something new in these portraits and I look forward to experimenting with colour similarly in the future! 

Reflection

Overall, while these pieces are not my favourite ones to have worked on, I think I learnt a lot about how I like to represent myself and my personality in my works. While I do think some elements of these portraits can be refined further (especially in the line-work) I am satisfied with the final outcome and I think that certain stylistic elements of these portraits are definitely ones that I can draw upon in the future to create some interesting compositions!

Connection to Creative Practice

I think this work connects to my creative practice most significantly as it is concerned with questions of identity and representation, which I enjoy exploring in my works. Additionally the concept of using symbolism to convey meaning is something I often experiment with, as I have done in my other Drawing projects such as Gestalt Principles and Digitised Figures.

Work from:
Drawing + Imaging with Professor Josephine Vargas