Self Presentation

Being a creative person I'm constantly exploring different concepts and ideas about the world around me. Trying to figure out my place in the world and the overall goals of my time here on Earth. From time to time, I turn this idea in on myself, expressing who I am and exploring the the ways I can contort my human figure to create art. Over the past few months I have compiled a few different self portraits, all with different concepts.

Two of the self portraits began with this picture:

Film Still
The concept of my first self portrait was to re-create a film still. This was inspired by the work of Cindy Sherman. For more information on Cindy Sherman's work, refer to my previous blog post. For this film still, I started with an image from Rawshon Marshall Thurber's comedy, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. The image came from the scene where Chuck Norris made his cameo:

My goal for this project was to completely re-create the film still, inserting myself into the scene. The first step was to take to the above picture. After this I needed to make myself resemble Chuck Norris as much as possible. I started by darkening my hair and the overall picture to match that of the film still.
Once this one done, I needed to give myself a beard. Through several brush alterations and color corrections, I was able to create a brush tool that very much resembled facial hair. I further tweaked the beard until I got it the way I wanted.

The next and most difficult step was creating the background. The process consisted of countless hours of scouring the Internet for similar background and foreground images (pepsi cup, people in the background, the other judges shoulder, etc.). Some I was forced to recreate myself in photoshop (the desk and name tag). I couldn't find some of the background materials, so I was forced to recreate the image, take a picture, balance the color levels, and place it into the background (the man on the far right). Finally, after countless hours of photo taking, google searching, and photoshop filters, I came away with a relatively close final product:

EXPERIMENTAL SELF PORTRAIT
For the second portrait, I took the same starting image of myself and altered it in a way that would give the image a completely different emotion than the film still. My film still recreation has a humorous, jovial feel, making it very lighthearted and funny.
I set out to create a very bizarre, unrealistic, and dark photograph. At first, the photograph start as pure experimentation. I played with filters, darkened the image, and attempted to change my facial expression.   This resulted in many failed attempts. My results were not meeting the emotion that I was attempting to create.

I changed my initial approach and began to focus on the parts of the photograph that jumped out the most. These parts were my right arm, eyes, and background. I decided to completely remove the background and replace it with a dark color and texture. In order to give it a darker feeling, I pulled out the bright whites in my eyes. After this, the only thing that drew the viewers eyes straight to it was my hand giving the thumbs up. I chose to copy this piece of the image and recreate it through out the image. This gave the image a surreal, bizarre feeling, while pulling attention away from the one hand since the piece was repeated through the overall image. My final product is below:

OTHER SELF PORTRAITS
Over time I have compiled a descent amount of photographs of myself, many of which I just don't enjoy to look at; however, there are a few that I took recently that I have really enjoyed. These photos hold great composition, great color, and really pull an emotion from the viewer. The two photographs are very different in their use of colors: one very dark, and the other very bright and slightly overexposed. I felt like both photographs were worth sharing.