Photoshop Portrait

For this piece, I used photoshop for the first time, and mainly just played around with the paint bucket tool. I chose a picture of myself that I liked and also one with a bit more movement and life to it than a straightforward shot. This photo allowed me to play with shadows and texture as my head was tilted slightly and my shirt is visible. I chose to stick with a neutral color palette that matches my real skin tone, and add the shirt I was wearing in the photo as well. The shirt had several intricate, blue flowers scattered across it, and I really liked the way the subtle blue complemented the color of my skin. To add some unity and also emphasis, I chose to make the background varying shades of blue to match the flowers on my shirt. The angles are very intentional as it is actually a corner of my room that is also in the original photo.

As I had never used photoshop before, this was a very experimental project for me. First, we chose a photo of ourselves and imported it into photoshop. After learning some of the basic commands to copy, paste, and move the image, I added a drawing layer above my photo layer. Next, I selected the brush tool at around a size 12 and began tracing certain shapes and features of my face. I knew I primarily wanted to add texture and value to my portrait by using different color shades, but I also wanted things like my nose and smile lines to be more defined. After I had traced everything, I used the eyedropper tool to get a color match to certain areas of my skin. I first started on my neck, so once I had gotten the correct color from the photo, I used that color to draw an area I wanted to fill with that color. I repeated this process throughout most of the piece, using the paint bucket to fill everything in. On a couple of areas like my nose and hair, I made my own decisions on where to add shadows and highlights, and on the shirt I just drew on the flowers by "hand." Lastly, I traced the angles of my wall in the background and filled it in with the same blue shades as the flowers in my shirt.

Using photoshop was definitely a new process of creating art for me. I have never done much digitally, so it was really interesting and fun to experiment with a new way of creating different elements and principles of design. I tried out different shapes of color to add highlights and shadows and analyzed my own face a lot more than I would just drawing it by hand. I was paying attention more the form of my face and the shapes individual shadows create. Once I got the hang of using the tools, I evolved to adding more details to my face, which you can see on my more defined features like my ears, eyes, around my nose and around my mouth. I also ended up going back to my shirt at the very end of the process, because I wanted to add shadows to it now that I had figured out how to do it well. When you zoom in close, there are some small mess ups and the black lines aren't very clean, so moving forward I would either pay more attention to keeping those defined lines with more contrast or either no contrast to the rest of the colors on my face. Also, now that I have some basic knowledge and skill with photoshop, I would like to try and create a portrait without first tracing it, and just adding form to it by layering shades of color to create value.