Self-Portraiture

It's about time for me to do my annual self-portrait painting. It was something I decided to do last year, when I painted my self-portrait digitally. Lots has changed over the course of this past year. But right now I'm trying to decide on which media I want to work in.

I'm also working on putting my portfolio together for college 'cos dammit, I want my BFA. So I want to do something that I could include in a portfolio -- I'm thinking of working traditionally.

It's been a very long while since I've painted my self-portrait. I still do self-portrait drawings, 30 minutes, no erasing. It's something I picked up from Evil Professor Rex, and I actually really enjoy it. It was something he had us do for homework in his life drawing class, and it's also something that he critiqued us very strictly on. He critiqued us on likeness as well as technique -- his background is very academic, artistically speaking, so he wanted us to draw as objectively as possible.

I'll admit, I was afraid of doing my self-portrait before I took his class. There's something about it that's fraught with issues, especially if you identify as an artist. Like many women, I have issues with the way I look, but after looking at myself in the mirror once or twice a week to translate what I see onto paper, I've discovered I'm okay with the way I look now. And when you identify yourself as an artist, there's also that whole set of baggage that comes along where not only do you have to draw yourself, you have to do it WELL because you're an artist, not a five year-old with a box of crayons. No pressure.

So here's a progression of my self-portraits, starting from my time in Rex's class to the ones I do now on my own. I'm only including the ones I think are better, because it's my blog and I get to curate things here, but these are the ones I'm happy with. Later I'll put up some of the self-portraits I did in his painting class, which was a whole new kettle of fish entirely.

Yes, you're going to see my construction lines. Like I said earlier, we weren't allowed to erase. I never understood some of the students who did surreptitiously erase -- missing the point entirely. It's good training to (1) put your initial marks down lightly, which is something I think I'll always need to work on, but also (2) it trains you to choose where you put your marks down, 'cos once it's down, it's down. It's worse when you work in pen, which Rex would have us do sometimes -- but I like working in pen because you can't erase. You have to put your marks down with confidence, or they suck.

For the most part, these were done in thirty minutes, no erasing, in pencil. The very first one, August '09, was the very first one done for Rex's class, and it's done across two pages of sketchbook, which was something I did a lot of at the time. The one next to it, September '09 was actually 45 minutes, and we were permitted to erase, which made me all kinds of happy! The very last one, dated September '11 was done in black Prismacolor Verithin, which I really enjoyed working with.

You're not seeing the ones where the proportions are uber-squirrelly, or the ones where the technique was really bad, or the ones that were really unflattering . . . well you get the idea.

So right now I'm doing the self-portrait drawings more often as a warm-up for the self-portrait painting. I haven't decided whether to post a WIP of it; but when it's done I'll definitely post it online.

Improvement

Just to show how far I've come since May of '09:

(stock courtesy mizzd-stock)

When I did this piece, it was the best thing I'd done to date digitally.  This was done in OpenCanvas 1.1 with a graphics tablet.  I didn't know how to floodfill the canvas in OC, so in order to introduce tone to the canvas I had to ruddy well paint it in.  I did this in a single layer, in one hour.  Even then I was aware that the likeness simply wasn't there, but I was quite happy with it.  It looked sorta-kinda-almost realistic.  Yay me.

Recently I discovered OC's ability to create event files of the paintings one creates in it, so I went back through and watched myself paint.  When I came to this piece though, I was horrified by how bad the initial drawing was.  Was I --?  Did I --?  Eek.

I'd forgotten how that drawing looked since it had gotten painted over in the process.  Compare to the drawing of my recent self-portrait:

Granted, painting the self-portrait took several hours, and as a result, it's a great deal more polished -- but my drawing technique's improved quite a bit. Even now, with my hour-long (not quite) daily sessions of painting, my drawings have more information; are less . . . slapdash.

Thank you, Evil Professor Rex.

(note to self:  must draw a portrait of Evil Professor Rex as the supervillain he is.)

Fall Self Portrait, Complete

After several hours with the GIMP  I've finally finished my self-portrait. It took more than four hours, but less than six, I think, for the color stage. So, all in all, I think it might have taken somewhere between seven and ten hours. Not all at once -- there's a lot of getting up and walking away involved.

Of course, now that I've slaved over it, I suddenly feel the desire to become an abstract expressionist.