self portrait

Perhaps you have seen my  recent self portrait, completed last month. I wanted to do another drawing along the lines of the one with Elora, and I had been thinking about all of the other pictures I took that same day. I was considering combinations of mediums again, thinking of attaching other elements to a base drawing, though I still didn't have a complete idea in mind. More and more I kept thinking of this photo, and one night I pictured it like this, partially in color, partially black and white. I don't know why, but it seemed perfect!

 

It was the first portrait-type drawing I've been excited about in a long time. I liked the moodiness of the scene, and I even liked how my hair wasn't done and was getting frizzy from the humidity, so it had a less 'posed' look about it.

I made the same mistakes I almost always make on a self-portrait: I tend to make my face too long or too skinny, and no matter how hard I try to catch it early on, I don't notice until everything is sprayed with fixative and I can't change it. Still, it kind of just makes it seem my own drawing style, right?

As I was working on it, I realized I hadn't done a real self portrait in years, and none where I look like I do right now. When I was in school, self portraits were a regular assignment in art classes, we did at least one in every class, if not more. I was looking through my art files and found quite a few of these, both assignments and drawings on my own. They are all very fascinating studies on my various hair-dos ;)

For instance, this was from a yearbook photo from my Freshman year. The chin is not too bad, though you could argue it's more a portrait of my hair than anything else:

 

 

I'm not sure if this was drawn when I was a Sophomore or Junior , but the face is a little too round to look like me, don't you think? The only part that really looks like me is the hair again. Drawing those darn glasses always messed me up.

 

 

We did these Prismacolor portraits in my Junior year art class. The cheeks look a little weird, but we were drawing our portraits from mirrors, and only had the 12 color set of pencils, so I was pretty proud of it.

 

 

We did some interesting self portraits in my college classes. This one was done completely out of fingerprints, using an inkpad! (Sarah, didn't you do one of these?) I believe we used mirrors for these as well.

























This was done in my first painting class, and was the first portrait I ever painted in oils. Not too bad, I thought. Though I could've probably taken out the flash reflection on my glasses from the photo reference. Also...long forehead.
 It's been so long since I've done an oil painting (all my supplies would have to be bought new and I'd need to fix my easel if I wanted to do one now) that this is probably as good as a first attempt I might try today.

Another oil painting from a photo. I wish I would've worked harder to make the stars more realistic, but the face looks cool.

























And of course there are the dramatic self portraits from my senior show. I took a bunch of photos with blue and orange lights for these paintings. It is called "Precariously Perched". I loved it when I did it, but now I see lots of things that I would fix- the giant florescent-light halo, the lame stars (again), the entire face on the angel version...I like the big evil face though.

 

My blogger avatar is probably the last real self-portrait I did and I was pretty happy with it. I finished this in 2003, before I started dating my husband.  I just wish the texture of the paper didn't show up so much in the photo.

 

 

Of course I have dozens of drawings that aren't officially self portraits, but I'm still in them. I found these little drawings last time I visited home; they're some of the oldest ones I have, dating from 1991. Isn't our family so cute?

 

And I have some cool drawings from college like this:

















Have you ever had to draw a self-portrait? Right now, I still like the most recent one the best.