Painting my self portrait - Part 2

Today, we started working in Art on painting the self portrait using mixed medias. At first I didn't really want to go too far astray from regular painting materials, but after Ms. Sudra showed us a video on this artist called Vik Muniz, I realized mixed media could be very interesting. One idea he had I really liked was to draw clouds in the sky using clouds! In an airplane, he made cartoon looking clouds with the smoke trail he left behind. While I wouldn't really be able to do that, I still thought it was an interesting idea and started thinking about more varied mixed media I could use.

Here are a few of the materials I used so far:


Torn pieces of old homework - as I said in an earlier post, I love reading and I wanted to have some sort of text in my painting. I didn't want to cut out pages from my books, though, so I used scrap paper, in this case old homework. Cutting up homework felt great too :)
I cut it up with the paper cutter into long horizontal strips, then put a lot of glue on the paper and tore off small pieces to cover it all up. I went one There were three very different shades in my arm as I painted it, so I used different looking homework for each (Chinese, History and English). I painted one zone after the other and coated it all with glue when I was done.
I'm not sure if I want to paint over the text, which would make it blend it more but also look less like text, or if I'll just leave it like that. It looks like I'm wearing a white glove, which is quite nice as well.

Piece of cloth - While looking for different media, I found this piece of cloth that looked exactly like the coat I'm wearing in my picture. I thought about using it to paint the whole coat, but the problem was that there were some areas of it that were overlapped by hair, and I didn't know which media I would do hair in. So I only used actual cloth for the sleeve. I cut out a small piece and glued it so that the cloth would still have folds in it, approximately at the same places as the folds in the original picture. I then found a small piece of white napkin, which I added at the top of the sleeve. While it’s not present in the original picture, it looks interesting and provides a transition from the red coat to the white hands. The napkin also reminds me of Christmas, my favorite holiday.

Colored sand – I had a set of colored sand to create mandalas at home and I thought it fit into this project nicely. Colored sand has an exotic feel to it, which reminds me of my travels. I started by coloring my lip with it. I first painted the lip with glue and then just spilled some sand over it. I shook the paper and some of the sand stuck on the lips and the leftover just fell off the sheet. For the eyes, I decided to experiment a little bit by mixing the different colors of sand. It took a little longer but it was really fun and allowed me to experiment with lots of different shades. The only problem I had while using the colored sand was that I shook the sand off the wrong way – there was still some glue left on my arm, and some of the sand stuck on it, making it look as if I was bleeding. I shook it off and added a little bit of torn homework to cover the areas that had been changed the most, but a little bit still remains.

At the beginning of this unit, I didn't really want to work with too many mixed media because I thought the end result might look a little strange. However, I realized that as long as you stay somewhat subtle, mixed media can really add something to your portrait. It's a very interesting way of showing who you are. The materials above were easy to work with and I think they all looked great at the end of the lesson.