Self Portrait

Being a self portrait, the subject of the artwork is me. I decided that the original setting, or background, in the picture would have taken away too much from the actual portrait, so I did not include it in the final piece. Leaving, instead, the white of the paper. This artwork was made using the grid technique with medium softness charcoal pencil, making up most of the piece, along with some dark 6b graphite pencils in different parts. I chose to draw this specific artwork for my project because I thought it looked goofy how my hat was perched on top of my head, and I liked that it was semi-candid, instead of me looking directly at the camera.

I don't know what the composition rules or techniques are, so if I did use them then they are somewhere in there. My project slowly evolved as I got more comfortable with the charcoal and my stroke became more even as you can see: the hat and face being more blotchy, while the neck, suit coat, and shirt were more smooth. Also, I realized about halfway through, that I did not have to do all of the patterns in the hat and shirt to convey the general meaning of this project, so they are not shown in the drawing.

The meaning of this artwork is in the process of it: when doing this project, it helped me get better at self portraits, and become more comfortable with charcoal, shown greatly in how different this is from the one I did in the beginning of the year (under time capsule drawings subpage). This project relates to my life because I see myself everyday, but with this specific project it forced me to look much more closely. If I could revise this artwork, I would go back and smooth out the shading in the face and hat, and also make some of the proportions more true to scale: the eyes and left side of the face are slightly off kilter.