For my self portrait I focused on the occupational and social/recreational sections. I’m currently an undergrad going in for Welding Engineering, And I like art (hence the name of the blog ha). Because these are two of the biggest areas in my life I knew it’s what I wanted to focus on. Went through a lot of steps, failed attempts, and scrapped ideas to get to the final piece but here we are. So I decided to join the two as best I could. I took some of the more common materials science and metallurgy equations. I couldn’t find a suitable background that didn’t turn them into indecipherable gibberish, So I made one. with the painting itself I wanted to do a few things, I left negative space so that I would have a good place to put the equations without having the issue that I was having with the stock photos I found online. I decided on flowers because that’s mainly what I typically paint and draw the most (and planets would’ve taken a lot longer). part way through I realized that with the time I had and midterms coming up I wouldn’t be able to do the painting justice. But the more I thought about it the more I liked it unfinished because it’s an accurate representation of how many of my non school related projects end up until I have enough time to actually finish them. And sometimes even when I do have enough time I end up changing my mind about the direction I want the project to go or have a new idea altogether. So I left the three flowers blank and left the initial pencil sketching in to show they are a W.I.P not just white spots. Onto the background, I chose this background specifically for a few reasons. One it’s my living room and it’s where I spend the majority of the time when I’m at home, but we also have a lot of dark earth tones which contrast very nicely not just with my colorful painting but also with some of the other elements I wanted to showcase in the picture such as the pillow because I’m usually so tired from school and work that it’s what I end up doing when I’m finally home. Towards the bottom you’ll notice my palette with standard brushes and my airbrush because I frequently use both to get the desired effects I’m after. At one point I started getting too deep into the rabbit hole of meanings of things, for example the holder that the airbrush is sitting on is a DIY holder that I made out of pvc pipping because I like DIYing anything and everything. But that’s where I decided to stop there because I started getting afraid of making the project too busy. So here we are, pretty happy with the outcome and blend of physical and digital media. This was my “brief” paragraph, hope I didn’t bore you to death.
