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Journal sielwolf's Journal: Yourself 10

Journal by sielwolf

Self-Portrait (11-27-2006)

Final class project. Between this and the last the classwork was... classwork. Things I did because we where in class not because I had any feeling that I was getting anywhere working on them. So the final project was a self-portrait. The picture I snapped the day I got back from Thanksgiving so I could print it out and grid it up (after doing a left-right correction for mirroring of course). The instructor had the idea of doing all of this errata of our lives (things that are special to you, etc) but I just wanted the simplicity of painting a face. Reality wasn't the reason. Chagall said that art should begin where reality ends. So a painting could be representational without being realistic.

I came out ruddy in the picture I took and so I thought I should run with that. I wanted to have uncut red in the final painting. The hard hue itself. It all worked out from there. I started above my left eye, running down my left cheek, across my mouth, over my nose and then making a loop around save the right eye which was the last thing I did of my face. I then did the glasses, the ears, the shirt collar, the hair, the shirt and then the background. The background you see is actually the third and the most true to the tone of the room I was standing in. Originally it was a shade of navy blue... which I then blew up because I didn't like the use of all the primary colors. The effect evened out all the colors and I felt it lost something. So I went over it again with burnt sienna and dark green... but it still wasn't right. The lighting effect on my face makes it obvious that there is a light right above my head. So the dark background gave me the look like I was under spotlight: the reporter-on-the-scene lighting.

So I then went with this linoleum green. I think it makes it pop a bit more. The instructor will probably tell me I should have done something to fill the space more but I think that isn't true. The interesting thing about this painting is the shading/tinting technique I used on my face.

Because I don't have any proper painting setup at my condo right now (which will be remedied soon) I paint flat on my table top under my lights. Well the lights are pretty hot and going right at my acrylic which causes it to bake and seal even more quickly. I've gotten retarder and played around with it but I found the results suboptimal... mostly because of my weak use of it. What I wanted was to understand the theory of composition of color: how two colors aligned next to each other blend in the eye and produce an effect neither has alone.

The classic is to look at a Seurat and La Grande Jatte. I wish I could find a better page with an actual closeup of the piece because you would see how Seurat put on his oil pretty thick and so you have these little bauble twists of color on each other. Velasquez did something similar with these very diffused brushstrokes (a good close look at Las Meninas illustrates this). Anyway, to do this isn't just dumb luck: it's knowledge accrued with the experience of taking something and trying to replicate it.

Me shooting the original picture in low light had the benefit of bluring the picture a bit and the resulting image having a lot of blurred pixelation. Looking at it, you could see the colors seperate. So this helped me with the relational color but had the drawback of the picture being undetailed. As I am working in 28" paper that has the drawback of not providing fine details to draw. So the resulting piece up close is wanting. But the results are interesting. The mix of the red with the yellow sierra and black made for some interesting color clashes. It might have benefited to try the technique universally instead of having it only on the fleshtones. Of course that then makes the face (more) the focus of the work.

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  • and i mean that nicely.

    it's hard to pick out your color harmony scheme. could that be complimentary?

    nice work.
    • This is classic "Taking Picture of Yourself Online" picture explaining why I have the wierd look on my face :P

      The photo actually distorts some of the color so you don't get an exact sense of what it really looks like (the fault of me taking the picture last night in my kitchen). IRL I think the coloring is more obvious. But the color mix seems to work even though it's obvious that they aren't nice smooth gradients :)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by subgeek ( 263292 ) *
        at 2am last night i thought somehow that feigning an inability to discern the red/green scheme was amusing. 2am is like other times of day in that i can be horribly misguided. the color is exactly what i like about it, which is good because reading your explanation it looks like that's what the whole idea was.

        i was referencing this kind [google.com] of wild beast. the color is just ferocious and uncivilized, and therein lies its beauty.
  • kinda startled-looking, very red, i like the contrast, the look of interruptedness.

    And it even kinda looks like you.

    • There was a portrait contest at the American Portrait Gallery and one thing I noticed was that A. a lot of the artists are very very good and B. because they where so good, a lot of their work seemed less like art. It was realistic to the point of being indistinguishable from a photograph. I think art benefits from a little bit of the impossible. So that's why I went with the strong colors in this one. It gives a sense of it looking both right and not-quite-right (if that makes any sense).
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The issue is that a lot of them I end up painting over... because this high weight art paper stuff is expensive (like most art supplies actually)! I guess that's my gift to future generations: when my work is up in the Getty and they put it through an X-Ray machine and find a painting underneath they will totally be excited!!!

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