Self- Portrait

-April-

This was my first experiment with a style that smushes together all of the things I like; namely, bright colors and Daniel Richter's style. Before I did this, I was messing with photos in HP Image Zone (no, not Photoshop, I don't have it or know how to use it) and seeing what effects I could get. I thought all of the things I could do were interesting, so I decided to make a piece that used a ton of different effects. First, I had to take a picture of myself that worked, and then I edited it maybe twenty times over and printed out little pictures of all the edited photos. I used these as reference, in the end only using ten different styles, and had to stick with my little copies since my computer dies with all the full-size originals. (Each picture was a little smaller than the piece with the realistic eye, I would guess.) After that, I sketched out my picture onto the canvas, divided it into different shards, and colored each of them randomly, only decided how to do them as I did them, so I didn't have any idea what the final product would look like until I had it in front of me. This caused a few little problems but worked surprisingly well; I only had to repaint a couple areas. The biggest problem was actually the canvas- it was really big and also unstable, as I discovered after I had stapled the canvas to the frame. One of the wood pieces I used was warped, so it was constantly pulling out its staples and trying to mess up my canvas, but it hasn't succeeded yet. Anyways, after I painted myself, I painted the background black and splattered some of the colors I used onto it, so that it would be filled but not distracting from the piece. Overall, this piece was easy except for its large size, since painting it was pretty simplistic. Because of the size, though, it took a really long time.


The idea behind this was to show how storytelling, represented by the tape, helps to hold together all of the different facets of yourself. After all, no one is just the person they show to the world- maybe they're also a space cowboy or a pirate or a colonist on the moon. But without some way to express this imaginatively, such as storytelling, these parts of you would never be used and would die off. Thus, creative writing was created, both to entertain and to satisfy those different parts of yourself.