For my self portrait, I actually chose a photo of myself. It is one of my senior pictures and probably one of my favorites. I decided to create my self portrait that represented myself, what I love and believe in. I chose to go with flowers because I absolutely love flowers, to me, they’ve always symbolized love, freedom and natural beauty and I’ve always tried to bring that out in my self. I believe that I am always changing and finding more of myself and there are so many different kinds of flowers that I can represent myself as. Flowers are always blooming and I feel like I am too. I identify myself with love; for myself, my family, friends, boyfriend, coworkers, etc. It is important to me to love myself and the people who I care about. I love freedom and I have always wanted more and more of it. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license and a car and couldn’t wait to go to college.
When creating this, I first started with my body and found a picture of a bunch of flowers. I used the clone stamp to go over the ones I wanted and stamped it over my body. When this picture was taken, I was actually standing in a covered bridge, and so I didn’t want this portrait to look very harsh. So, I found sunflowers and traced the beams. I then decided that I wanted more of a floating look, since I feel like I do tend to float sometimes in life, so I thought it would be appropriate. I was going to add swirls into the background with paint but decided it looked weird so I used the smudge tool and thought it looked really cool. I then blurred out the sunflowers to add more representation on my actual self. I increased the exposure to brighten it up, as well.
This is the original photo I worked from.