Art-Historical Self-Portrait

For this project we had to first do a self-portrait and then choose an artist or an art-movement that inspired or interested us. First, we drew our self-portraits. When I started drawing it, I had no idea what I was doing and I really struggled trying to make it look realistic. As the project went on I figured out that shading and value were really key to making the features look three dimensional and photo realistic. One major set back I had was when using a grid to help me with making features looking proportional. I drew the grid for the nose and mouth too low, so I had to pretty much start over with all my shading and features on the lower part of the face.

After I finished the portrait part, I had to choose an artist and draw a background of the drawing inspired by the artist I chose. When choosing, I was interested in post-impressionism for an art movement, but I did not really have a specific artist in mind. When I was looking for an artist, I really liked George Seurat's work. I especially liked the looks of pointillism. I ended up doing pointillism for my background and I used oil pastels. I chose to draw with oil pastels because I thought it would create a cool texture when making the little points and I also liked the colors of the oil pastels. Most pointillists use only primary colors, so I decided to do the same by using red, yellow, a darker blue, and a lighter blue. In some places, it morphed into a green or an orange like I wanted the colors to.

Overall, I think I did a good job, especially on shading, because some of my features ended up looking three dimensional and realistic. For the most part, I like my background and my color choices because I think they worked well for pointillism. If I could go back and change a few things, it would be not to draw the random blob of color for the background where something was blocking the picture. Also, I wish my chin did not turn out looking disproportionate and too long. I think I also could have used darker grays because my value scale consists of a lot of medium grays and light grays, but not a lot of darker grays. There are a few more details I would like to clean up, like better shading to make the features look even better, but in the end it turned out ok.