Self Portrait Pt. 1

For the self portrait project, we had to create two digital self portraits using Illustrator. The first portrait was more restricted, requiring one shape used in five different sizes and five different variations on shade and tint. Additionally, none of the shapes could overlap. The second portrait's only requirement was that it used a shape, so that was a lot more flexible. I chose to use a reference picture for both portraits, so they would actually look like me.

I chose to use a circle as my shape for the first project, and used a purple as my base color. I then picked four other shades/tints out of the color wheel, and created a palette to work off of. My hair was the predominant feature in the picture I chose, filling most of the frame and covering half of my face. As such, that is what I started with. I started at the front of my head, beginning with my hairline and the pieces of hair in front of my face. I made the beginning of each strand with larger circles, gradually shrinking the size of the circles as the strands continued. While this is not what hair actually looks like, it helped to define each strand and to create an illusion of volume on top of my head. When it came to the hair coming from the back of my neck over my shoulders, starting the strands thicker helped to define my neck. My hair used three different shades of purple, with the fly-aways being the lightest and the clumps of strands being the darkest.

I then moved on to my face, where I started with my eyes. Only one was really visible in the image, but I put part of my other eye in to my self portrait so it looked more human-like. My eyes are dark brown, so the darkest purple was used there, with light purple being used to define my eyelids. My nose was left mostly undefined, as was my mouth. My eyebrows, I underlined but did not make particularly thick, as I felt they would detract from the chaos of my hair. My chin and neck are very faintly defined, but I left my clothing out of the image, as I felt it was an unnecessary addition to the image.

For my second image, I chose to stick with the circles. I liked the way they looked when they weren't overlapping in the first portrait, so I stuck with that decision as well. However, I felt my first image looked delicate, so I chose to do something more bold and graphic for this one.

I started this image with black circles on a white background, again doing my hair first. I kept the strands going from thick to thin, but made all of the circles bigger and did fewer strands. In terms of my face, I chose to only do my eyebrows, but I filled them out using circles going from large to small, rather than underlining or outlining them. They are easily identifiable as eyebrows, therefore implying where the rest of my face would be without displaying it. Once I finished this portrait, I (on a whim), decided to see what it would look like inverted - with white circles on a black background. As white on black, it seemed to pop off of the screen, holding my attention for longer. I felt this was a significant improvement, so I kept it.