Photoshop Portrait

This project explored a new medium for me, and was most definitely a learning experience. I had know of Photoshop, but it is a pretty complicated piece of software to use. This piece is trying to find simplicity in the craziness that is Photoshop, craziness reflected in the choice of background, which is a busy and chaotic composition.

To create this work, I first began by selecting a photograph of myself, and moving it into Photoshop. Next, after adding a drawing layer, I traced the lines I observed on my face and clothing to create an outline. I tried to replicate the colors in the photograph as best as I could, but the variation and varying gradation was impossible with the flat look I was going for. I used the paint bucket tool to drag and drop color into my drawing, colors that were selected using the eyedropper tool. To finish, I deleted the background of my photograph, which allowed the edges of the lines to be less apparent, but allowed me to insert one of my drawings as a background.

This project could've been done many different ways, but I chose to keep it simple, so that I was able to focus on learning the program I was using. In hindsight, I wish I had made it more detailed, so that there was a little bit more visual interest. However, I think the craziness of the background balances the simplicity of the actual drawing nicely, but I still consider a more complicated foreground and simple background to be more interesting in a piece such as this. If I were to do this again, I would try to find a picture with a lot of variation in lighting, so that there would be a lot of variation in color, and a lot of linework to capture the shadows and highlights.