Self-Portrait

Here's the post of my self-portrait:

I haven't yet been able to figure out how to rotate it correctly, as it shows up normally on my system viewer.

The idea behind this portrait was to portray myself at this moment in my life: clarifying and taking ownership of my identities. I tried to capture myself as realistically as I am capable of, while also abstracting several things. For instance, the dress is a blend between two actual dresses I own, and the necklace is one that I haven't worn this semester, due to not having the materials to repair it. I've also hilighted my mole much more than it appears in this direct perspective.

The idea that Riva and I worked on manifested itself much better than I had originally thought! The curtain that I am parting and grabbing hold of in the portrait is made of descriptors that either my have told me the would use to describe me, that I have heard them say about me, or ones I identify strongly with--these are rendered in my natural italic handwriting. However, it's hard to portray myself by single or few words, so I also employed another device to complexify this: I added in a number of tropes from the fiction-analysis wiki TVTropes to help describe more complex parts of my identity. These are rendered in sans-serif printed handwriting. My expression is much more stern than I had originally intended, but perhaps that is an expression of all that I have grappled with this semester.