Course 1, Diary 7: Self-portrait Part 3

19.10.2015–20.10.2015

A new Monday after the holiday. It really is good to begin your school week after the autumn holiday (and normally) with a double lesson of visual arts. I was ready to continue my self-portrait (I believe I had too much inspiration left from continuing a personal project of mine on Sunday). I had to finish the outlines, and I did that.

WIP picture 1 - Initial lineart

I took a look at what I had done and I did notice that many outlines needed to be strengthened. I began to do that, but I did not manage to finish it.

On Tuesday I did manage to get the outlines strengthened and I could start to color the picture. I think that the sharper lines are visible in the picture I took.

WIP picture 2 - lineart

I had bought my colored pencils with the thought that they would be the color they seemed to have. I needed them for some personal projects. When I began coloring starting with the skin, I ultimately noticed that I had been wrong about the colors. And that skin-colored pencil was the reason I had bought that pack. Not good, not good. Those colored pencils are some wood-less colored pencils which even I could snap with my hands (I have a similar pencil; I’ve snapped it to a few pieces). They were a bad choice, I think, but I will keep on with them as long as they last or at least are enough for my works.

This truly is why I prefer making my art on my computer rather than on paper. I don’t have the issue of not having the exact color I need on the programs I use. The problem with programs is that getting the right hue can be difficult.

Enough about this topic. Half of the students have finished the self-portraits, so we are moving on while those who have their self-portrait in progress can continue their work. I decided to take my paper with me and finish coloring as I had some spare time right after school. I also did feel a bit like I was getting behind.

I took a better look at the face and thought about what this picture represents. I realized that anger did not belong there. I needed some stubbornness, something that made “me” look like I could say: “Now I am walking this way and you have nothing to say about it!” Therefore I took a selfie for some slight reference and changed the mouth.

WIP picture 3 - Change to the face

After making this the way I deemed good enough, I returned back to coloring. In the evening I got it this far. I decided to leave the background blank and ask some people at the class on the next day if it needed something there. However, very late at night I suddenly got an idea: making most of the background dark and leave some of the bottom white. For me it had a very fitting symbolic meaning, so I put the idea on my phone to the same text file I had put the homework to. I knew that I would not remember it otherwise in the morning anymore — that has happened to me many times before.

WIP picture 4 - Colors

What was that homework? We had to pick something (TV, newspaper, social media, etc.) and pay attention to the advertisements and tell on the next lesson about an ad which we could remember the next day. I admit that I forgot it and then remembered it when I checked the user interface my school uses for marking absences, courses and so on. The homework had been marked there by the teacher and as that was the evening, all I could do was to make a makeshift thing and wander around Youtube, paying more attention to the ads than just the normal “skip after 5 seconds”. I wrote a couple of them down on my phone. I told the one I encountered first and a couple of times after that on Wednesday’s lesson then. It was simple enough.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s