Avast! A Self Portrait!

   This is the second "postcard" assignment from my portfolio class, the restriction was that we had to work in the style that we'll be approaching our final pieces of the class with. Our instructions were to paint our "alter-ego" in that style, in any medium and format. So, I drew up a couple of ideas and came up with this painting for a self portrait:

   There's a strange thing that keeps happening whenever I try to post this particular picture online because the colors always dull out. Maybe its' because the JPEG version has to cut a few corners, who knows. But I've tried several times to amp up the vibrancy in the colors and it always comes out looking a little flat. 

   This painting is the absolute direct result from me working digitally over the past year. For some reason, I can't seem to grasp the concept of putting paint down on canvas anymore; I have to work in layers for it to make sense to me. Everything on this painting is a cut-out shape that had been arranged and pasted together, which is more of a refinement from the planar portraits that I had done last quarter. To me, this painting felt like a stepping stone as far as the way I approach the working process. 

   Its' almost a combination of painting, collage, and digital refinement wrapped in one, and while working in this way cannot accomplish any of those particular things fully, I'm finding that it offers a couple advantages that is unique to the cut-out shape process. For one, because I am using the cut shapes, I'm able to arrange things exactly how I want them to look as I'm working, rather than planning everything out beforehand. This leads to a more spontaneous composition, which is like a godsend because I think I've always resisted the planning stages more than anything else while painting. Second, I was also able to paint with hard, defined edges that would take very careful precision if I were to paint them all regularly.

   The downside of course is that it is difficult to create contrasts because everything is created separately from each other. Without having everything around it to compare to, colors and value tend to go wherever they please, and the whole painting as a whole could have trouble feeling unified without touching it up in Photoshop afterward. That, and my arm fell off from the strain of cutting out the shapes, and my x-acto knife literally exploded from overuse. Now I only have one arm left, and a broken x-acto knife to cut it off with.