Narcissism in Action

Look, something that isn't bone white and associated with death.  Yes, it's me, my first self portrait in...  Oh, OK, not that long really since I did a quick sketch of me for my facebook profile not long before I began this blog.  Still, it occurred to me that since I'd started it you hadn't seen what my terrible visage looked like (although since only people who know me have likely looked at the blog you may already know what I look like); this is about to change.  You may even see a photograph!  I know, try to restrain yourselves.  I'll begin with the finished self portrait, and then proceed to the blow by blow replay.

There we go. If you've satiated your interested then feel free to move on to elsewhere on the interweb-highway, otherwise read on MacDuff!

Everything has to begin somewhere, and this began with me deciding I should do a self portrait. Rather than using a mirror I used a webcam, and took some shots from which to work. Technology marches on, suck it up :) I had also decided this would be a piece done in Artrage using the oil paints, as I wanted to get used to them. So, several webcam shots later I had this:

Which was actually a mistake, but the most visually interesting of the shots I took.  Sometimes accidents can be good things.

Next up was a sketch in Artrage.  First I laid down a rough background (Which I came to hate) and then I sketched over the top of it. I forget which tool I used for that, it was either a soft pencil or heavy chalk.

This sketch looked enough like me that I decided to proceed.  This decision would eventuality bite me on the backside, as you shall see.  If I'd known the final image was going to take as long as it did (somewhere in the region of 7 hours at a guess) I'd not have relied on a sketch that took less than 3 minutes.  Live and learn.

So onto this I started laying down the paint.  Since the palette in Artrage lies in the corner of my monitor with wonky  colour guns I picked some appropriate colours and plonked some paint up in the corner to chose from.  Based on these I could tweak the colour slightly blindly with the palette as I went along, but I would always have a reliable base to return to.

I'd put in quite a bit of work by this point already, at least a couple of hours, and probably more. You can see I've got the shadows from glasses I'm not wearing yet.  That's something I won't do again as I had to line the glasses up with the shadows rather than just on my face.  Tsk.

This was some time later, and you can see I've added in the glasses and the hair.  You can also see that I've adjusted the angle of the neck and my cheeks, which was because my Son saw the work in progress and said it looked like my face was on someone else's head (but in 3 year old speak of course).  There's a lot of images this time, had you noticed?  Lets have another.

Here I've roughed in the background (which never got much more complex than this) and added the blurred hand right up by the "camera"  Looks pretty good I guess.  You can also see I did a little colour mixing on my colour blobs in the right hand corner.  I never did get rid of them as I was so used to them being there.

After this I finished the background and the chair, then decided the colours were a little to over the top.  I could have adjusted the whole image using sliders, but that didn't seem like the most appealing (or non-destructive) method, so I threw a colour wash over the whole thing to warm the colours a bit. This made it less like the webcam colours, but I liked it more.

The picture is now at a stage where you may think it's finished. I certainly did, and posted it to facebook. Then I went off and did 4th of July type stuff before returning to it later on and realizing just how wrong I was. The forehead was too high! The angle of my head too straight! I didn't want a duplicate of the original photograph, but I did want some of the things that drew me to doing that particular picture in the first place. Artrage's transform tools came into their own, as without them I would need to repaint the top of my head, and I'd just have to live with the angle. The transform tools aren't as powerful as in some other packages, but it did allow me to give my head a more jaunty angle and to scale down my forehead and hair a bit. I still had to do a lot of repainting to fill in the resulting gaps, and to clean up the seam. Since I was still working in paint anyway I also tidied up my cheeks again for good measure. Here's the final result (again):

Oh, and finally, here's that profile picture I did a while back for you to compare for progression and stuff:

So in future I'll spend a bit more time on the initial sketch I'm to paint from and save myself some issues later. Lesson learned.