Geometric Portrait

            Portraits have never been a favored subject of mine (there’s something unsettlingly vulnerable about staring into one’s own unblinking eyes), but it never fails to be a subject I’ve returned to for one reason or another. Mostly it’s been the same as the origin for this project, a college assignment- a challenge- practice in developing skills and working with the one model you’ll always have at the ready- yourself.

            For this project I started with a photograph of myself, imported it into Adobe Illustrator and created a fresh layer on top of the photo. On the new layer I began creating lines with the Pen tool to define both the shape of my face and patches of light and shadow. This is where I made my first mistake- as this was my first real time working with Illustrator I wasn’t aware that to create a solid fill with the shapes I thought I had created- I needed to create closed shapes, rather than simply connect lines with one another. After realizing what I had done, I was forced to hide the layer I was working on and to start a fresh layer above the old lines- so I could go back and forth to reference what I had done before. And I found that as I went back over the photo a second time- I was creating my shapes more based on lighting than form. Whereas before I had blocked in the contours of nose and cheeks with the structure of my lines. The second time I allowed the lighting in the photograph to delegate how the shapes would be formed. I did run into a few more issues with the piece, as sometimes I missed areas by creating shapes around areas and neglecting to craft those areas into closed shapes. This was fixed in the later portions of my process, by going back and creating closed shapes over those areas. Once all my shapes were created I used the selection and eyedropper tools to select shapes and blocks of color within the portraits to fill the shapes with a solid color. Lastly I hid the layer which contained the original photograph and created a new layer directly above it- below the line layer. On this layer I created a gradient that worked well with the original lighting in the photograph.

            Overall I think I like the final product, though there are areas where the background peeks through a few unintentional gaps between shapes- and the outlines of shapes at the top of the hairline that refused to fill. I still have a lot to learn about using vectors and Illustrator in general, but I think that this has been a good project to pick up the initial skills with. There are absolutely many things that I need to improve on and hopefully with the following assignments I can begin to get more detailed and intricate with my work.