In my piece, I tried to add many different creative layers that expressed my identity. Firstly, I made my background orange as it is my favorite color. It sounds very cheesy and not very out of the ordinary, but it is actually other my dad's favorite color. My family has always been my biggest support and the base of my life, that is why orange is my background/base of my piece. Secondly, I used the symbolism of antlers. I have always love deer, and admired the beauty behind the antlers that stuck out from their heads. It made them different. That's when I realized that to me, antler are a symbol of being different, like your always walking around with something that sets you apart. You can either choose to accept or your differences, and it has been a very hard a long path to accepting mine. That is why one has some strands of hair covering it, to make it seem more hidden. The other side is more open and has a little heart, showing the tiny but important growth I have made in accepting myself. I know my piece is not going to make much sense to to other people just looking at it. It sounds selfish but because this project is about identity, growth, and acceptance I wanted it to be about my growth as an artist this year, and make sense more to me as I am a more private person. I highly relied on my reference for the shading and composition of my body, but I choose to make some differences as I wanted it realistic but not hyper realistic. I have always loved cartoonish styles and I thought it would be fun to add a hint of that to my realistic side. One side of my composition being more hidden also adds to the aspect of hiding your true self.
I have never painted an acrylic painting of myself and I learned a lot from this experience. I personally struggled a lot with blending and the pigment of the paint, as I have always loved using watercolor. Painting hair with acrylic was the most challenging, as making it look realistic is difficult in any medium. The paint often would look streaky, and then when attempting to blend it make it look worse. As I went along it was a lot easier to deal with the pigment and add highlights. The benefits of acrylic is that whenever I made a mistake it would quickly dry and I could cover it up, but if I did like the amount of pigment I had it was impossible to blend out. To blend I often used water to blend out the edges and use light and or darker colors to make them blend into each other. I'm very excited to use acrylic to use acrylic again, and learn even more about this interesting medium.
I would personally love to mix more colors, and learn more about using such few pigments to create brand new and beautiful shades.
