Self Portrait

The assignment was to draw a self portrait using conte crayons and a mid tone paper. Black and white without any blending. I practiced just with a pencil and sketch paper to see if I could get the dimensions right, considering how much of a perfectionist I can be when it comes to drawing in a semi-realistic form. But I didn’t like the way I looked. I blamed it on my hair, and thus paid $50 at some place I had never been to that gave me a really fun hair style. Some years after it grew out, I went back to it because my friends at the time insisted that it screamed me. It screams me only if I’ve got the money to upkeep it, which I don’t.



This self portrait is from the Winter Quarter of 2002, for my Drawing 2 class. Honestly, I hate drawing myself. No wait, I don’t mind drawing myself in a not so realistic form, as I did it for three years in a short lived web comic, but I don’t like looking at myself for an extended period of time in front of the mirror while I attempt to replicate the image before me. Hence why I ended up getting the hair cut. I couldn’t get the longer hair style to look right in my drawings. That, and the southern heat and humidity was driving me insane. With as thick as my hair is, and how unused to the southern weather as I was, I desperately needed a change to help me feel a bit cooler.

This self portrait makes me laugh though. There’re a lot of good memories connected to it. It’s the class where I met this one guy who out of the blue came to over to me and declared that he wanted to be my friend. He was a film major, and used me in a lot of his projects in one of his first film classes. First one dealing with telling a story using photographs, one of which I have, while another was a music video, which I luckily have a copy of. Looking from the video from when I was 21 to now shows me how much my face has thinned out. And I still am told that I’m too young to know where there’s a good liquor shop around town.

My friend was hilarious as he complained about how he didn’t see the need to learn how to draw the human figure. Basically, he didn’t want to take a figure drawing class because it meant having to draw over weight men and women. Not that all of the models were over weight, but the idea of looking at the naked figure of someone that was completely disgusted him. I want to think he got over this particular fear once he finally took the class, but our friendship dwindled once I moved out of the dorms. My fondest memory of him, though, are the times he and I spent with another friend playing Frisbee in their dorm building court yard.

But he wasn’t the only one involved in the memories that this portrait reminds me of. My teacher that assigned this piece required us to have it 80% of it to be done by the next class. It was an over the weekend project, and knowing how much I disliked drawing myself in the mirror I immediately set to work; just to get it done and over with. By the time we had our first critique, I had more than the 80% that was required, and only needed to make a few adjustments with the background before the next class. My teacher was impressed, and kept pointing out all the different things he was trying to drill into our heads. What they were, I can’t remember specifically; but what sticks out the most when I think of him was his love of lines and scribbles. His theory on drawing and art was anti-rendering. No blending, nothing overly realistic. You made a mistake, then it’s what made the piece better. Never erase the mistake, or else you’ll never remember where you made it to begin with. Compared to the teacher I mentioned in my first post that told me I needed to clean up my work, this drawing teacher was my hero. Despite the times where I want things to look beautiful and perfectly clean and well rendered, this teacher showed me that being sketchy and messy was just as beautiful and worth while.

I cannot thank him enough for that.

After the assignments had been handed in and graded, mine was returned to me with a note of apology. And as soon as he was done passing back everyone else’s projects, he returned to my desk to apologize in person. It wasn’t for the grade, as I received an A+, but it was for the fact that my portrait was on the bottom of the pile. So by the time he got to mine, the wall he had to display our works was already filled. He felt that it did my piece a grave injustice not to be displayed. Honestly, I wasn’t too concerned about it, and consistently told him that it was ok. A roommate of mine some quarters later was pretty sure she saw an enlarged version of my self portrait hanging up in that class’s building. I’m guessing he found a way to make it up to me.