i made a life sized self portrait :0
Into the Weeds
For our final project in my figure drawing class, we were tasked with making a (very large) self portrait. The dimensions are around 48x36 and took about 4 weeks of class time to finish (about 6 hours a week) plus one all nighter.
After taking a reference picture with the help of my lovely friend, Meg, I started by blocking in the shape of the figure in vine charcoal. measuring the figure and finding angles that allowed me to build the figure rather than piecing it together through a grid method.
I began to leave the measuring and blocking of the figure phase and began to render the portrait in charcoal, when my lovely teacher made a joking comment about how I was really “getting into the weeds.” I found myself getting lost in digging into the minutiae of skin texture and finding the flow of curl patterns. I wanted to make this portrait feel as tangible as possible even if it is, in reality, just a piece of paper.
