Social Profiling № 1: Owain

Back at the start of the month there was a thing going around on Facebook. People would post something along the lines of "Paying it forward 2011. I will give something handmade by me to the first 4 people who reply, on condition that they repeat this message and do the same for their first 4 respondents." This popped up all over the place like a rather smelly chain letter, and struck me as being a bit, well, naff.

So I did my own which read "Who wants me to paint them a profile picture? I'll do four, two for the UK, two for the States if anyone wants one. There's a catch though - I get to pick the picture, and I can't guarantee it'll be any good. ;)
Anyone game? I'll do them over the next week or two (and unlike that paying it forward thing you don't have to do anything, not even use the picture if you hate it)."

I got 16 responses out of 140 friends. I don't know if that's good or not. Anyway, it's taken more than a couple of weeks, and I've only got two finished. I was going to speed paint them, but they ended up taking a bit longer each, and as a result they each get a post of their own. I randomly picked 4 of the respondents to do profile pics for (and it really was as random as I could make it) and started from the top of the resulting list of 4; my old chum Owain.

Clicking the image will make it rather larger.

I've known Owain for about 18 years, meeting him when he was a mere 16 years old. We had a lot of good times as part of a larger group, including making several very silly but extremely fun short films and taking our first trips to the US together in Florida where he turned 18 (coincidentally, one of the other profile pics I'll be doing was of Annette, who also came on that trip, and who also turned 18 while we were there).

After college we fell out of touch. We kept in contact by mail for a few years, and many was the time my day was brightened by a witty missive from the "Blonde Toss" as we called him back then, but the writing both ways dried up and I hadn't seen him or heard from him in about 12 years. Facebook has restored the connection to a degree, and I'm happy to say he hasn't changed all that much from what I can gather from his posts (this is a good thing).

So, enough background, how about the picture? Well, it's a failure I'm sorry to say. Oh, it's a perfectly good portrait for itself - it looks quite a bit like him - but it fails to capture him as it were. It's a good portrait of his physical presence, but not of his inner being. If it had been more graphic, or art deco (which is pretty graphic anyway) or done in the style of a good movie poster, or even just extremely silly, then I think it may have been more successful. Still, fail as a profile pic, win as a likeness, how's that?

I've asked him for permission to post the photo it's based on, but he hasn't responded yet so I'll leave a space here for when he gets back to me:

[SPACE FOR OWAIN'S PHOTO)

OK, photo permissions supplied, so here's what it was based on:

And here's the step by step.

Owain was in New York for his wedding by the way, he actually lives in Swansea, but having the Empire State building in the image was something that just worked for me, so there it is. I think the whole thing took 5 or 6 hours, though I really don't know why as it's sort of rough.

Not much else to say really. I hope to meet up with him next time I'm in the UK, but since I'm notoriously lazy about staying in touch, and he's not fond of pubs (Unless that's changed) I give it a 40% chance of occurring. Time alone will tell.