Social Profiling № 2: Steve

Quick recap: Painting four profile pics for four of my Facebook friends.  You can see the first here; along with a better explanation. This is the second.

Since that first post I've managed to crank out the third in the series, but I'm still only at the point of writing up the second.  Will I get the third written up tonight? Unlikely, but possibly tomorrow (more likely next week).  But what of the second? The one of Steve? The one I'm supposed to be talking writing about now?   Well, if you'll stop interrupting we'll get to see it.

Okay? All done with the fidgeting? Good, let's get to the pic.

Click the pic to increase it's largitude.

So I've know Steve a few years, and up until recently he was a colleague of mine at work; we even shared an office for a few months. As a result of this I have a reasonable handle Steve's personality. This time I learned from what I felt was a mistake on Owain's and tried to make the profile pic fit the person, with the likeness being of secondary importance.

The first step was to go through the photos available to me on facebook. This did not take long as I found the photo below and just stopped there.

Really, what could top that? As it happens Steve is a musician (and actor) not a Chef, but this photo caught the perfect facial expression and level of humour. It reminded me of the Swedish chef from the Muppets. Now, throw in that Steve, as a musician, has a banjo he's very fond of, mix it all together and what else can you do?

Is it a good likeness of Steve? For being a muppet sure.  I'm actually not happy with the stance more than the face - the photo has him standing back and proud, while I've painted him slightly hunched.  It works, but it's not quite what I was going for.  Additionally his hat looks very rough.  in retrospect I should have spent more time on it.  Y'know what though? I could nit-pick my own work for hours. You know this, I know this, let's call the whole thing off...  No, hang on...  Here's the step by step (enlargeable this time):

You'll note that Steve's nose changes a few times in there. In the end I felt that having a human shaped nose was just kinda creepy, so I swapped it for a regular muppet nose after some other tests. Oh, and that is Steve's actual banjo Kermit is playing (though not to scale) - it seemed pretty apt to do that, but I think it took as long to paint as the rest of the image combined and it's still not quite right.

Steve seemed to like it, but didn't use it as his profile pic - that's A-OK by me.