Self Portrait

Created for my parents during the first Covid lockdown.

Dark blue is my favourite colour, so I enjoyed being able to use this in the background to convey more of myself in the piece.

I found the process of having to really look at my own face in detail to be quite the experience. There's something very confronting about having to look closely at all of your own features and struggle to capture your own likeness. Whereas with 'fake' people such as in the Pan piece I did, it did not really matter if the likeness didn't match the reference as nobody knows who they are. So with this piece the challenge of trying to capture my own likeness was quite the adventure.

There were times with this painting where I really struggled to get a good likeness and I was close to giving up. But I kept iterating and reminded myself to be brave, make marks on the canvas and keep going. After many iterations over the form and likeness I eventually reached a point where I was happy with the result. Once I achieved this I stopped making significant changes as it was remarkable to see how even small changes can really alter the feel and likeness in the result.

Technical

I always like to make things difficult for myself, so with this piece I chose to put the lighting in a less conventional setup. From what I've seen, most self portraits will light the majority of the face and have the far side be in darkness. With this I chose to invert the lighting, and I think overall it worked, but I would probably try the conventional setup if I chose to do this again as I did find it harder to work in the shadow sections.

An interesting thing I've noticed on self portraits is that people rarely smile. Initially this piece had a neutral expression but I changed it later to be a slight smile. I was pleased with this change, especially as the piece was for my parents. Technically I probably needed to put some more more wrinkles and smile lines in to the piece to match this, but I found it quite difficult to do this without making it too unflattering!

Most of my focus was on trying to achieve the right values and likeness. Due to this, I do feel it is missing some more colour variation that would create more visual interest and realism. Additionally I found it interesting how when I tried to have more dramatic shadows on my face, it made it harder to get a flattering likeness to my own face. So in the end I was happy to focus more on the likeness and let some of the other aspects slip as I think the likeness was the most important thing to try to achieve.