my third attempt at a self-portrait…and I still don’t love it. Of the three, it is my favorite, but every time I look at it, I see issues (too many to name here). This experience has taught me two things:
- never try to re-create something you see so often as it will never be perfect enough
- if I choose to do a self-portrait again…I might try an abstract or conceptual piece instead
oil pastels, 08/2010
even though I don’t think this image looks a lot like me, there are a few things about it that I am proud of; it challenged me, opened me up to experimenting, & made me use a medium I am not completely comfortable with.
if you follow my sketches you will notice that I use oil pastels quite a lot, however, that was not always the case. Before my first sketch with them, my pastels had been sitting in a art supply box for seven years! It has only been recently that I started using them and started to feel comfortable.
so, when I first set out to do a self-portrait, I chose to do it in color pencil—a medium I love and use often. But the final results were really unpleasant for me and I was frustrated that I had spent so much time on them and they didn’t look how I wanted them to. I decided what I needed was a medium in which I lost a little bit of control; a medium that didn’t allow for me to plan or sketch out what I wanted, but instead would force me to just start and go…let me tell you, that experience was exhilarating!
losing that little bit of control really made me appreciate the final piece (even though I don’t think it looks like me), because it challenged me in a way that the colored pencils didn’t. However, I think that it is fair to say, I will not be attempting another self-portrait for quite sometime.
Indexed under: color, color pencil, control, face, female, oil pastels, portrait
