VOSS

Self Portrait Collage

One of my favourite projects from my visual arts studio class was a self-portrait collage from October-November. It was a two-part assignment with the first part being an in-class paint mixing tutorial. Basically we sat in front of a mirror and had to learn to mix paints to match the colours in our skin tones using only pure red, pure yellow, pure blue and cold red, cold yellow, cold blue and white. The colour “swatches” we made in class were to be torn up or cut up and pieced together to make a mosaic of our faces (Part 2).

I’ve been meaning to post the “making-of” photos from this painstaking 40+ hour project for a while now but kept forgetting.. but here they are now!

The original photo that I used. I totally cheated here because we were supposed to build the entire collage in real time looking through a mirror… but nobody did:P

A very lazy cut out and some colour correction

I wish I was better at compositioning but I’m not.. so instead, I get crazy OCD and plot coordinates….

A coordinate map of my face

What happens when you get to Z? You start again with AA

The skin-coloured “swatches” from class

Laying it all out…

And, here we go!

It’s a little creepy because I kept seeing my mom or my aunt Fong in this…

I was sooo excited to do the hair because I’m the only kid in class who has purple hair:P

Oops… Cheated again.. I totally ran out of swatches for my hair so I had to make some new ones…

The texturing was sooo much fun to do!

My little ear…

I’m chewing purple gum?

My glasses are the only part of the collage in which I used scissor-cut pieces to try to imitate the straight edges of my plastic frames. The rest of the collage was made up of ripped pieces to maintain a more organic effect.