(upbeat jazzy music)
-: Hi, I'm Janet Fagan
and today we are going to be using the portrait
as a way to explore self expression and identity.
So we're gonna be using materials that you can make yourself
or that you probably have on hand at home
and we'll need to be in a place
where you can see a reflection of yourself
and hopefully have a good light source
on one side of your face.
I'm sitting in front of a big mirror here
and you can see that I have light coming from my right side.
You can go into your bathroom if you like,
sit in front of the mirror in there
if you have a lamp that you can pull in there with you
to create a light,
maybe turn off all the other lights except for the lamp.
Even a hand mirror will work well
if you can prop it up on something to keep it steady
while you're drawing.
That's a great tool.
Or a makeup mirror maybe on a stack of books
or something to keep that handy.
The other things that you're gonna need,
you're gonna need some paper that you can work on,
couple of sheets.
I also have part of a paper bag here
that I'm gonna be using.
You might wanna get that ready
and then you'll see that I also have several piles
of different colors that I've cut out from magazines.
So make sure these are magazines that nobody's reading
or wanting to look at again.
But I have separated the colors
into reds, oranges, and yellows or warm colors;
blues, greens, and purples or cool colors;
and then some darks
just to make them a little bit easier to find.
The other thing that I've done
is a way to prep my materials is I've done some writing.
So this is just different thoughts that I've had,
pieces of poems that I've written,
some stream of consciousness thinking,
just words that are meaningful to me
and I've taken colored pencils, a regular pencil,
and a magic marker and just put them in different blocks
trying to use different handwriting,
different ways to make these blocks of texts feel different.
I have a couple of light ones for areas
where I may wanna have a little more light
and then I have some deeper darker ones
for areas where I may wanna show some darker areas
or some shadows.
So if you wanna prepare that
or you can look for text from other sources.
This is just a page, an index out of an old atlas
that is actually out of date
because the world has changed since this atlas was created
and so I was able to pick it up at the Goodwill
for just a couple of bucks and I've had it for a long time,
I use it every now and then,
and I just decided to pull a page out
that represents Seattle.
So Seattle is on this index page and that's where I'm from.
So, there ya have it, some materials to get us started.
Then once you're set up in front of your mirror
with your light
you're gonna start with just some really general observing.
Get this hand mirror out of the way.
So I'm just using a number two pencil here
and this will work just fine for you.
You're also gonna need scissors today and a glue stick.
So observing, I'm looking at myself.
I'm looking at myself head on
and I'm just gonna create a very simple line drawing
of myself because what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna create a line drawing
and then I'm actually gonna cut it up
and I'm gonna cut out the shapes that I find
to create positive and negative shapes
that I can then turn into collage elements and stencils.
So I'll show you what I mean about that in a minute.
But first, I'm just gonna take some time
to sketch out a very simple likeness of myself.
So I'm starting with a big oval for my head
and then a cylinder for my neck,
a line for my shoulders,
a line suggesting the scoop of my T shirt that I have on,
and then I'm gonna just give myself a little bit of help
keeping things organized in my drawing
with a proportion map.
So I made a center line top to bottom,
center line again from side to side
to just give me a guide where my glasses are gonna fall,
and then a center line representing the bottom of my nose
between the eye line and the chin,
and then one more center line for my mouth
between the bottom of the nose and the chin.
Okay so I'm gonna start, I'm gonna start with my glasses
because they're giant and I can see them really well
and they make a big shape.
So just starting with the bridge,
sketching out the big shape of my glasses.
This'll come into play in a little bit.
And then I'm gonna look at just the outline of my nose.
I'm not worried about the details
I just want very, very, very simple shapes.
So what I see is the side of my nose flares out
into the sides of my nostrils
and then the bottom of my nose is kind of a wave
making room for my nostrils
and then the bottom of the ball of my nose
which comes down.
My mouth, I'm gonna look at it closed and not moving
so I can get a feel
for what the outline of my mouth looks like.
Okay so just really simple.
Top and bottom lip,
extending my chin just a little bit
because I got kind of a little bit off track
from my proportion lines there,
so I need a little more length for my chin
and now I'm gonna look at the bit patterns of light
on my face.
So I see there's a big pattern of light on the side here
that goes down behind my glasses
and then I'm noticing that my hair is a shape,
it kinda goes off the page like so,
kinda triangular away from my head
and then my hair comes in defining the side of my face.
So I'm getting these lines here along the side of my face.
They're defined by the hair.
Okay and I'm gonna go over this drawing
a little more carefully now
because I'm gonna cut it all out in just a second
and I wanna make sure I know where to cut.
Now that I have my drawing outlined and emphasized
I'm gonna go ahead and cut it out
and I'm gonna just show you an example
of what we're aiming for.
This is an example that I did at home
just to give you an idea of where we're going with this.
So, you can see here that this
is the negative shape of my drawing
and this is the positive of my drawing.
So the positive shape is actually what I've drawn,
the drawing itself,
and the negative shape is all the space around it
and these are gonna be our tools for building our portrait.
So the first step is not to cut it out to this degree.
The first thing I wanna do is cut out just the outline
or the silhouette and you'll see why in a sec.
So I'm gonna just do that now.
(fun contemporary music)
So now I've got my silhouette cut out
and I'm just looking at the paper that I brought with me
and I am going to use this brown paper
and you'll see I did the same thing when I made the demo
and this is the cutout.
So I'm gonna cut out the shape of my silhouette
from the brown paper.
So I'm just laying it flat.
I'm gonna give it a nice dark outline.
(fun contemporary music)
Now I think I could use this paper as my working paper
and collage this on like so as a starting point
but I think I'm more interested in this.
So, I'm gonna pick this up and use this as my background
and it's already starting, just with that addition,
I'm starting to tell the viewer a little bit about myself
with this portrait.
So it's starting
to already have a little bit of self expression in it
just with the choice of the background
and the color that I'm using for my head and face
and you're gonna, woops, can't hang on to the glue stick.
And you are gonna have a lot of these fun choices to make
as you go.
So everything that you add can share a little bit
about who you are, how you see the world,
what you think is important,
things that you would like people to know about you
'cause art is a super effective way to communicate
about who we are and what we care about to the world.
Sometimes it's easier to make a piece of visual artwork
with a message that is meaningful to us
rather than to actually speak the words to someone.
So it's a great way to express yourself.
Okay, so next step I've got my silhouette on my background.
Now I wanna start building in the features
that I have in my drawing and the way that I'm gonna do that
is I'm gonna cut them out just like I did in the demo
and I'm gonna show you where we're going with this.
So this is the demonstration that I did yesterday
and you can see I had my hair up
but the idea is using text that has meaning,
using colors to define yourself, and you want to,
as you're expressing your identity in your portrait,
you always wanna have in the back of your head
that you're making a piece of artwork
and you want it to be harmonious
so that the choices that you make should flow together
in a way that your whole composition is united
and we'll talk about that more as we go
but you can see here for example
I used this dark blue to float through the composition
and carry the eye from the top to the bottom
and side to side
and also choosing the text in the background
really helps to pull things together too
and also actually gives me more leeway
to use more variation in the face
if I have something unifying the whole composition.
Okay, so I'm gonna cut out all of the individual shapes here
so that I have them to work with.
(fun contemporary music)
So now this is where the fun part happens
because you get to start making those creative decisions,
how you want to define yourself here.
So, I am excited to use
the text that I created.
So I'm just gonna think for a second,
how do I want to show my eyes?
So I think I'm gonna go with,
because I want to draw attention to my eyes,
I'd like to emphasize them, so I'm gonna go with a color
that has a good attractive quality and that's red.
So I'm gonna go into my red text
and I'm gonna lay my eye shape over the top of the red text
and I'm gonna cut out the red text for my eye shape.
So to make that a little bit easier
I'm just gonna go into the text
and separate it from the other blocks of text
and the other thing that I'm gonna do
to make it a little bit easier
is I'm gonna flip it over so that I can trace
not on the text itself but on the back.
So I also flipped over my template or my shape
at the same time
because you want them both to be facing the same way
so you don't get a reverse of that shape.
(fun contemporary music)
The next thing that I wanna do,
just to sort of orient myself,
is I'm gonna go for the big shape of the hair
and so looking at my reflection in the mirror
I know that the light is coming from one side
so I'm gonna try and emphasize that.
So, just to make things a little bit more straightforward
so that I can start to see where I am,
I'm just gonna take my pencil
and I'm gonna outline the edges here.
And then once I do that
I can see where I want the color to go.
So I'm gonna start with some light on the right side
and some deeper darks on the left
and I'm just gonna have fun building this.
So I'm just laying it in right now
just so I can get a sense for how I want to cut it.
Okay, so now I'm just gonna take a few minutes
and fill in the hair
and get that how I want it by shaping the edges a little bit
to match what I have in my drawing.
It doesn't have to be perfect.
I'm just thinking in big general terms right now.
We can always tighten things up later
but for now just keeping it really nice and loose.
(fun contemporary music)
So, you start to get the idea
for how you can go back and forth
between tracing out your templates
to give details of your features
and then using your templates just to spatially show you
how to fill in different areas.
So if I go back and look at the finished demo
you'll notice that I'm just hitting a few key shapes
and I'm even going back in and drawing with the marker
to kind of pull things together.
So it's really up to you how you determine
what do you want to emphasize.
In the piece that I'm working on now
I'm emphasizing the colors in the hair
and what I see through my vision,
which is a poem that I had written yesterday
and this piece I'm emphasizing the color in the nose,
the highlight here, and then really the pattern in the hair
of the bricks echoing sort of the pattern down here
in the body of me, of the person.
So this is something that you can sit with,
you can think about what the right choices are for you,
what you want to include.
Maybe you wanna take some time to do some writing
away from this for a little while
to think about introducing that element into your piece.
In the headband here I have a crow that was,
a crow, it's a poem about a crow.
I have a poem
that I love that is about one of my favorite birds, the crow
that I included in the headband.
And so you can see that it just has a little bit of the text
giving just a clue into that.
So you don't have to tell the whole story
but the more glimpses that you can give
into what's important to you and who you are,
this will become a more personal portrait
that expresses your identity.
All right, so thanks for exploring this with me
and have fun hangin' out with your reflection
and thinking about these tools
and how you're gonna put them together.
(upbeat jazzy music)