Design Principles: Project 1

20th January - 28th January 2022 / Week 3 - 4

Alana Sofia Othman / 0353451 / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Design Principles
Project 1

LECTURES

Week 3

What is a Self Portrait?

Its self reflection in a representation of a drawing, painting, sculpture, etc. Its not about your realistic physical appearance but more of a self expression on your journey.

Self portraits are about being honest and completely transparent with yourself. Who you are, what you are feeling at that exact moment. However, they can also be about how others see you, whether it truly is who you are or what you are feeling.

Its about your identity, realistic or not, true to you or true to others. Self portraits tell your story. If you were to do a self portrait every year and journal it. People decades after your death will be able to decipher it and learn about you and your life's story. Self portraits capture a single moment in your whole life's journey.

INSTRUCTIONS

Project 1: Self Portrait

Getting to Know Myself

Mindmap

I started with a mindmap about myself. Round 1 of Idea Sketches came based off my mindmap and how I felt.

Figure 1.1. Self Mindmap

Proust Questionnaire

After my first batch of sketches, I was advised to answer the Proust Questionnaire to help and see where it will take me. I had an emotional ride while answering the questionnaire. It brought up alot of things about myself that I usually avoid thinking about. I was struggling with holding back tears as I was answering some of these questions as I was just overwhelmed with emotions.

If you'd like to read my answers, you can find them at the link below. I chose not to blatantly put them up as a pdf or jpg as some are honestly quite personal. However alot of my answers are not exactly "great/right" and some are even unanswered. So read at your own risk.
https://bit.ly/3o50oiM

Ideas Round 1

References

Figure 2.2. Reference for Sketch 1.1 & 1.2

Figure 2.1. Reference for Sketch 1.2

Figure 2.3. Reference for Sketch 2.1

Figure 2.4. Reference for Sketch 2.1

Figure 2.4. Reference for Sketch 3.1

Figure 2.5. Reference for Sketch 3.1

Sketches

Figure 3.1. Sketch 1.1

Figure 3.2. Sketch 1.2

Figure 3.3. Sketch 2.1

Figure 3.4. Sketch 3.1

In Sketches 1.1 and 1.2, my idea came from how I felt lost and confused, with this assignment and life in general. I drew myself lost in the jungle trying to find my way with a compass. I pictued myself holding hands and bringing my demon(s)/baggage along with me.

In Sketch 2.1, the idea began with my sad and melancholic emotions that Ive been feeling the past few months and eventually was combined with my agnosticism. It started off as a dementor (Im a harry potter fan)/demon looking being sucking my soul out but my agnosticism came when I subtly hinted towards 'The Creation of Adam' by Michelangelo. While I was sketching the position of my hands, it reminded me of Michelangelo's painting and I realised how ironic and amusing it would be to bring that into play as well. The idea of a soul sucking demon also giving me life seems wild.

In Sketch 3.1, I thought of going simpler and sticking to a classic self portrait while also creating a "mess" or a "fuzz" to my mind. I wanted to paint the mess and fuzz with colours of the emotions I have been feeling recently. The fuzz and mess is supposed to cover my mind aswell as my eye as I am often blinded by emotions.

However, with me being confused and lost, none of these sketches were "right" for the self portrait assignment. I was then advised to answer the Proust Questionnaire and see where it takes me.

Ideas Round 2

References

This time, I actually did not have any visual references, which is a first for me. Instead my reference was my own words.

In all honesty, after answering the Proust questionnarie, I was still lost. I still had no clear direction of who I am at the core and where I am metaphorically. I slowly read through everything I answered for the Proust questionnaire and what I wrote in my mindmap. I thought about my values, mindset, beliefs and I slowly realised how conflicted I am as a person.

I have never truly explored who I was, am or could be, I am who I am now because of my parents, sisters, friends, my pain, my regrets and my happiness, Im not original but I know I am an individual and that makes no sense.. I am who I am because I simply do not know who I am, I know it sounds like a Dr Suess book but its true.

Before I started sketching, I wrote this down to somewhat guide me and make things make sense even when it or I do not really make sense. I used these words as my direction as I sketched.

I dont want to live,

yet I do not want to kill myself
Im ok not being happy

but I am not ok being sad or angry

I want to be surrounded by people

I want to explore and have adventures

but somehow I wish for more alone time

and always, I wish to not leave my room

Im conflicted

Im up, Im down, Im inbetween

Im a rollercoaster

I cant make decisions

I cant figure myself out

I am conflicted

Sketches

Figure 4.1. Sketch 4.1

Figure 4.2. Sketch 4.2

Figure 4.3. Sketch 5.1

I chose to make my frame square as it was ironic to use a square and just frame when Im talking about being conflicted and indecisive.

In Sketch 4.1, I thought of doing a photo collage of all the things, places and people that make me happy with a sad me drawn on top of the collage. The idea is to contrast my happiness with my sorrow to convey my conflictedness. I wanted my eyes partially closed and to show my face looking away at an angle to further stress my indecisiveness.

Sketch 4.2 uses the same sketch of my self portrait. I thought of approaching it a little more pop up art style with splitting it up and using contrasting colours of sadness and joy. I split it diagonally so that its neither vertical or horizontal to further convey how I cannot make my mind up.

Thinking about the whole "conflicted" theme, I just thought about the ocean on fire for Sketch 5.1. It just does not make any sense. The red face is supposed to be me on fire surrounded by the ocean.

Ideas Round 3

References

Figure 5.1. Reference for Sketch 5.7

Figure 5.2. Reference for all in Set 5 Sketches

Figure 5.3. Reference for all in Set 5 Sketches

Sketches

My Personal Favourites

Figure 6.1. Sketch 5.7

Figure 6.2. Sketch 5.8

Figure 6.3. Sketch 5.11

Sketch 5.7 stood out to me as it was a completely different approach to what all the others were. It had a simplistic, clean and more modern feel that I was sort of drawn to. The idea behind it was to try flip the background colour. I was constantly using the red as my fire background, so I decided to flip it and see what I could do. I then decided to make myself float and started drawing a face (supposedly mine but it does not look anything like me unfortunately) with the light of the fire reflecting onto the face.

Sketch 5.8 is supposed to be waves crashing into my face, slowly pushing me out of the frame and trying to put the fire out. I placed my face for only one thirds of the frame as neither the ocean or the fire are winning this conflicting battle but the ocean does seem to have the upper hand while I still persist.

Sketch 5.11 is my absolute favourite of all. There is some kind of peace when I look at it. I tried to make the face and the ocean a little more harmonious looking than what I was doing earlier, so I added shades of red. At first, I was trying to ensure the face looked like flames but it ended up looking like a stormy red sky.

All the Others

Figure 7.5. Sketch 5.6 Figure 7.6. Sketch 5.9 Figure 7.7. Sketch 5.10

Other variations that I did too. Some are better than the others but they were all not anything I wanted to push forward.

Progression

Animation

Although Sketch 5.11 was my absolute favourite, I felt clueless as what I could add to/do with it. So, I decided to move forward with Sketch 5.7 as I had a clear direction of what I could do with it. I decided to animate it to show some movement and make it clear to viewers that its a face floating in the ocean.

Video 1.1. Animation Progression 1.1

Video 1.2. Animation Progression 1.2

I decided to lower the transparancy of the lines of water movement as I felt it was too distracting with it having the most movement in the frame. The water movement disappearing and reappearing goes in different directions to add to things just not making sense. When it reappears, it seems to grow upwards whereas when it disappears, it goes downwards. It actually took me a really long time to get that right because I kept getting confused and messing the directions up. I drew everything frame by frame too which is a bad choice on a time cramp because it really is just painful, but hey, I did it in the end :)

Final Outcome

Ocean on Fire

I chose to keep my animation in a square icon form in hopes one day Spotify will support anything other than jpg images as playlist icons. In the mean time however, I have a static image of the final outcome with the playlist I would listen too while calmly floating in an ocean on fire.