For freshman year at Drexel in my digital design tools class, we were tasked with creating a vectorized self portrait for our final. For our workflow we were required to take a portrait of ourselves with some form of dramatic lighting and to use that as our basis. From there we created vector shapes in Adobe Illustrator to recreate our face in a more simple form. My piece was…perhaps more complicated than most of the others. Many had a simple, flat approach, but I wanted to try to capture my likeliness in a way that I was incapable of doing in a fine art format.

I had tried many times before to draw myself, but at my best it looked like a generic human, and at my worst it looked very much like a warped alien that was hit by a train. This project however, enraptured me. It made me feel capable and I worked on it for quite a bit longer than I most likely should have. However, my efforts paid off. The portrait was quite realistic and undoubtedly captured the lighting that immersed the photo in a sense of drama. To this day it is perhaps one of the pieces that I am most fond of.

I think that overall the moral of this story is that when it feels like you are bad at something, perhaps you just need to brainstorm a new way of going about it. I could never do a self portrait with pen and pencil, but by doing a shape based approach I actually became proud of my work, a feeling I seldom experience.