How did multiplying and reducing lines affect your self portrait? What did you see in your reflection or your depiction of that reflection that surprised you? Please consider line weight, direction, value, texture, quantity, placement, and value in your language as you write.
From the start, when drawing my first iteration, I had decided to take a less realistic approach to my self portrait. This was mainly due to where I chose to find my reflection. I sat down on the floor to look into the metal support bars of the table, hoping to get a small image of myself that I could use as reference. However, once I sat down, I noticed that the metal warped my reflection, making it appear as though I had multiple sets of eyes. This stacked and distorted view of myself interested me, in terms of a subject, as I often am unconfident about my appearance, and my perception of myself sometimes differs from reality. Thus, this became my starting point for my portrait. I then set out to draw a portrait, focusing more on the atmosphere of the image, rather than specific details. I noticed that it looked like my features were dripping off my face, so I made a note of this with lines that symbolised this. I included and took down all parts of the image that were interesting to me, rather than focusing on drawing a traditional portrait.
In our next iterations, when we had to consider line, I thought more about this theme of repetition that I already had in my portrait. In the second iteration, I focused on creating an overall shape with many lines, that repeated in a pattern. I attempted to use the increased quantity of lines to further convey the themes I aimed to capture in my first piece. Then, when asked to limit our lines my mind immediately went to doing a continuous line drawing, as that only requires one line. I am not sure if this was cheating or not, as my drawing ended up being more dense than my first piece, but it was interesting to create a whole portrait without lifting my pen. This limit made me think about each movement and direction change, as I wanted the line to be purposeful. It also shows how much a single line can do. Finally, for my last portrait, which was completed in exactly five lines, I took into consideration the overall composition of my piece, and planned what I wanted each line to accomplish, as if they were puzzle pieces. I used tactics from the continuous line drawing, in order to capture the detail I wanted. I then proceeded to work from the inside out, each line adding in more key features to the piece. Each of my lines varied in length and changed direction multiple times. With each iteration I became more and more thoughtful about what a line is, and how placement and intention can change its meaning. With this variance of line quantity, I was able to convey varying energies to each piece. For example, the one with a high volume appears very busy and almost looks to be vibrating, due to its repetition. Where as the single line drawing is much more still and feels less grounded.
