Self Portrait

When I went back home end of June/beginning of July I ended up binge watching several episode of ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’ on Channel 4, so when I next got paid I decided to attempt one myself.

There was a good several weeks between this happening and in that time I had gone to see the Stanley Kubrick exhibition at the Design Museum. One of the areas of the exhibition which I was quite taken by were the masks used in ‘Eyes Wide Shut’…

I thought there was something quite atmosphere and enigmatic about them, as well as the fact I really loved Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler which the film was based on.

Further to that my mum also did etching/painting at art college in the early 80s and one of them, which was always up in the hallway was called the ‘Halloween Party’ which had masks, so it all seemed sort of weirdly connected to me.

Anyway, Cass Art had a sale on so I popped in to purchase a canvas, and also saw they had some cardboard masks. Now I had ordered a super posh one to use, but at £3 I thought I’d try cutting it up and see if it worked, and it did! So, Amazon order cancelled, I took a photo to work from.

You can see one of my other paintings in the background here, I have used some filters here, to give it this 80s summer haze, but this is what I have been working from.

You can see the progress below.

so the eye placement was all wrong here, re-draw!then the lips were a bit off, so had to work on those a bit.finally getting some paint down.

Adding some shadow, started on the hair, but got bored with that (I hate doing hair) so decided to start on the background.

Basically trying to get as much base on as possible so I can start on detail and highlight.

I wasn’t happy with the skin tone or lips still, so I spent an evening working on those, of which I am much happier now.

I finished off the hair and also worked on the mask (which didn’t take long because obviously it’s white)

Faffing about on the eye and lips:

I had some work to do on the hand too, usually I am good at hands, but for some reason they troubled me on this one.

I did a lot of repainting over the original hand, I am not 100% happy but it looks a lot better (and more like a hand rather than four cheese strings)