Look at Me

Looking at Yourself (3 Points)

I chose to do the self-portrait visual assignment for my last 3 points. However, instead of doing a self-portrait of myself,  I made a self-portrait of my character, Sarah Mustard. I have not posted pictures of my character up until this point on purpose, because I still wasn’t entirely sure how she would look exactly and I didn’t like the idea of using a picture of a celebrity. So I thought this assignment would be a good way to describe my vision for Sarah Mustard.

I chose to dress Sarah in a gray overcoat with a matching hat, because of her profession as a private investigator. It blends into her environment more and doesn’t stand out as much. Underneath the overcoat she is wearing a blue dress, because she is also a reserved person in real life as well and I consider blue to be more of a reserved color. However, I chose to make her purse bright red, because I believe that Sarah is not content with her passive lifestyle and there is a part of her that wants to burst out of the shadows and be seen. Red is a color that gets a lot of attention and Sarah, on some level, also wants attention. She wears her long, dark brown hair down with her bangs almost covering her eyes, hoping to go unnoticed in that respect as well.

I chose to put various objects in the background of Sarah’s self portrait as well to represent her character. A mustard bottle, to represent her name and her family, sunglasses, because she likes to conceal herself from the world, Little Women, her favorite novel, a German flag, because she speaks German, pen and paper, to represent her observation skills, a pink pacifier to represent her illegitimate daughter she gave up for adoption, and lastly a ginger cat, because she now has a pet cat named Bailey (who has a remarkable resemblance to Crookshanks in the Harry Potter films).

I liked being able to draw her self portrait rather than finding a photograph for Sarah, because I had an image in my mind and this way I was able to stay true to my imagination. I’m no artist, so that made this take time, but I guess all my doodling during classes helped with making this drawing a bit.