Art Evolution: Self Portraits

I'd planned a different post for Pride Month, writing about how I've come to value representation in different forms of media once I actually found any at all, but between various races and the current heat I'm just too tired to actually write that. So, instead, still at least vaguely on theme because you can kind of tell that I was drawing myself how I saw myself the whole time, this is a look at the various self portrait attempts I've made over the years.

I've never done particularly many of these. I didn't have much call to before I joined social media sites, at which point I realized that I didn't want to use an actual photograph for most of them but the advice said to use your own face, so I started putting some together. (Sometimes I ignore that advice now. It doesn't seem to make much of a difference, engagement-wise, whether it's my face or a character's face.)

The above is the oldest drawing I have of myself, from the introduction to one of those DeviantArt art memes that I used to fill out a lot (which is why there's that stuff written there). Older ones may exist or have existed at one point, but there's no evidence of them.

Given that this was before I went to college, there is no chance that I didn't do this from memory, because I had the misplaced notion that using referencing was somehow cheating before then. I think I'm supposed to be wearing my leather jacket, but it's pretty scribbly.

The first self-portrait I have, at least (discounting a few pixel doll challenges that I have hidden away in an archive folder somewhere, and probably some scribbles from when I was a child that existed at one point), is this assignment from an art class in college. I don't recall the exact perameters of the assignment, but it was supposed to show something about who you were or what you did, thus the sword (for stage combat), the really questionably rendered bookshelf, and the art materials.

Alas, I must admit that I have never owned a suit of plate armor, nor a helmet. That is fictitious. I'm pretty sure I did it partly to look badass, partly to get out of drawing my torso.

I don't have the finished version of this any more, which I didn't feel turned out very well; it was the first portrait I used for social media purposes once it was together, though.

Here I put myself in my fencing jacket as another excuse to avoid the torso, and I was also trying to include Shale. It's not a particularly good portrait of him, I'm afraid; he was a beautiful cat, but since I think this was the first time I seriously tried drawing an animal it's not too bad for that.

I'm not sure why I went with the larger one. I think the smaller one was actually on track to turn out better, looking at it, but clearly I didn't feel that way in 2017. Also I was still refusing to admit that my face is, in fact, kind of round, and that was more accurate in the smaller one...

Probably because I wasn't happy with the final version of the above sketches, I did another one pretty quickly, more in the inking style I was using for Corner the Maze and then colored it. I took a reference photo to use, which I might still have somewhere in my hard drive, so this one is at least a little more accurate – although it's definitely got some issues. It also didn't read particularly well when shrunk down.

From a 5 minute art meme, a target which apparently I did not quite hit. This would have been done without reference due to the really short time limit, and it definitely shows.

I did this one in the style I was planning on using for a comic that I actually never started at all, but kept using it for a few years anyway because it turned out okay and read a lot better at smaller sizes than what I'd done before.

This is the only one where I intentionally chose to make some changes from the reference of my actual face, because 2021 was a shit year and I did this in 2022 and was trying to make myself feel less generally awful at least. It's more accurate now than it was then, but my face is still rounder than that.

When I started actually getting things together to launch Verdant Shadows, I decided that I did still want to use a comic-style portrait of myself on the about page rather than a photograph like I ended up doing for Corner the Maze, but the one I'd done back in 2020 was just too old and the one from 2022 didn't read very well at smaller sizes.

This was the first attempt. The angle didn't work very well and including headphones in the portrait made more sense in my head than it did in the execution, so I never ended up actually using it. But this is the first one where I was just trying to be completely accurate.

Pretty much right after, this is the one I'm using on the Verdant Shadows site and some social media. (I don't actually have a hat or shirt exactly like that.) It works well enough, so I'll probably keep using it until I decide that it doesn't.

That's the last one! Maybe I'll get to the other, planned post later this year, or maybe I'll end up sitting on the idea until next year. We'll see. The plan is for something comic-process related next month.