Title: Self-Portrait

Year: 2017

Overview: This project was a part of an exercise, in which I had to make a self-portrait based on the illustrations of a professional illustrator from a list of them. For my project, I had chosen to do Barbara Kruger while also adding my own personal twist to it.

Goals: The goal of this project was to not only practice the mediums of Photoshop, but to also show a creative depiction of myself in the style of the illustrator I chose to base my work from.

Research: For this piece, I had to first do some visual research on the illustrator. I saw that most of Barbara Kruger’s work was black and white photography combined with use of red boxes and white sans-serif, Italicized type. However, she also made works in which used effects or m roe than one photo, such as the one here in which two sides were shown of the person, one in normal, and the other in negative. This gave me the idea to use the idea of opposites in the piece I wanted to make.

Digital: However, unlike her piece, I decided to not have the characters directly next to each other, but on opposite sides, with the evil being upside down, and use an idea that had been in my mind for some of my fictional works, that good and evil live within all of us. With this, I then proceeded to take the two photos, one with a normal smile, while the other with a sort of grin/sneer. With these, I had brought both into Adobe Photoshop, and then to play off the idea of good and evil, rather than changing the ‘evil’ side to a negative, I decided to use spot color, giving the ‘good side’ green eyes due to how green can symbolize peace, and red with black irises on the ‘evil’ side, making it seem demonic, as if though playing off the type to create the idea of this sort of inner demon.