Thought

This is my abstract self portrait. For this project I was supposed to come up with an emotion, and represent that emotion with a self portrait. The thing I thought was really cool about this project was that I could make the art that represented exactly how I felt, even though words couldn't. I was supposed to come up with a word that represented my emotion but I was caught, being unable to get the perfect word. I was thinking of boredom, but I was happier than that. I was passionate, but more passive than that. I thought about daydreaming, which felt right, but there was not a direct emotion for that. I eventually decided to just start my project to represent myself through this art instead of through words.

I started the project with no pencil to sketch out my feature first. I used oil pastel sticks for most of it. I had a mirror right in front of me, so I just started the outline of the face. I knew that I did not want to have my normal skin color. I wanted it to be a purple sort of color, so I started with blue. I then started working on the basic facial features. I did some with reds and some with blues and blended them all together with white oil sticks. I worked on the hair next. My hair is red, though not as red as my self portrait. I wanted the hair to contrast with the face, so I used the bright red, with some yellows. I also used yellow for the arms, because that too needed to stand out from the face. I did not want to draw the arm or fingers with detail because I did not find it as important as the facial features.

After finishing the portrait, I needed to add a background. The portrait did not have as much purple as I would've liked, and it seemed more sad than sort of dreamy and in imagination. I thought about how I could represent the idea of thought. I wanted the portrait to look like it was getting inside its own head. I did this by making purple and light purple targets around the figure and inside its arms. These represented abstract thoughts. I also wanted to add concrete thought in as well because both are significant in the mind. I did this by adding contrast, with a dark fine point pen. I made geometric shapes with these clean lines to contrast the blurry shapes in abstract thought.