Inventive Portraiture

This project allowed me to contemplate, reveal, and reflect upon my self-identity. I focused on how I feel when I experience confusion while working on an assignment. After iterating various shape combinations and placements, I came up with my final. Within this final, I utilize pieces that weigh down or contort my facial shape in a way that makes me feel stressed and frantic. The color palette I selected worked well for my invented portraiture because although the colors were all different, they still all worked together within the facial shape. Once I decided upon the shapes, placements, and colors within the piece, I added extra details around and in my headspace to allude to depth. These inclusions were the blobs floating around that signify my ideas feeling everywhere at once. I also added highlights to certain areas of the face region to allude to a light source. The outcome of the portraiture was almost monster-looking and otherworldly because that is how I feel when I am confused and stressed while completing my work.

After completing this project, I gained an understanding of how shapes placed can allude to a higher meaning, in this case, mental states. I learned about how I feel while I work and how these emotions can be visualized. I also saw how creating many rapid prototypes can be added to each other to generate a better piece. I believe that I struggled the most at the start of this project because it took me a while to get my ideas off of the ground and actually in progress. Once I was able to get over my confusion and begin, all my ideas quickly took off. I believe the five drawings I chose out of the fifty prototypes I created best represent the emotions I face while working. To aid the prototyped forms, I used line weight, color, shading, and layering techniques to get the feelings across to the viewer. All in all, I felt that this project was beneficial to me as a designer because now I can visualize how I am feeling in any situation.