SELF PORTRAIT

I was talking to my wife about this project. She is currently collaborating with the art teacher at her school on a Humanities Curriculum taking place at the Huntington Library. She discussed with me that they were instructing students to perform contour drawings on each other while writing narratives about the process. She asked if I would like one, while I drew hers. I’m not going to include my drawing of hers here (because it’s pretty horrible…) but this is what she came up with. I like that we both had to keep serious faces for such a silly product - but upon first look at what she drew, I somehow really identified with the white background and the dark lines all connected to showcase my visage. It’s eerily like my face and it’s also completely not.

I thought of cropping her contour line drawing side by side with my favorite comic hero - but I couldn’t get it to work in photoshop - pretty upsetting actually!

I used photoseed to play around with colors, images and frames, but it all seemed bland. I then tried the ‘double exposure’ feature and was really surprised by the results. It seems more fulfilling to me thinking about the misty image of Superman inside of the line contour. While Superman represents a lot of things to me that I won’t mention here - my main reasoning for including is my dad. I must have been in 2nd grade when my dad bought me “The Death of Superman” comic - I remember waking up sick in bed, and having to stay home from school having nothing to do. I woke up, and next to my bed - there was this comic. I’ve followed illustrators, writers, and comic editors since that point of origin in reading comic books. Jim Lee, the illustrator of Superman above, is hands down my favorite pencilier in the graphic novel medium. So while the self portrait might be just two images, the emotional/situational relations create more of an impact for me.