When we first got this assignment, all I could think of is how difficult it is to sum up a person in one image. I knew that I wanted to go for both a literal and an abstract version of a portrait: both physically what I look like and also how I think of myself. My inspiration initially came from a doodle I did in the margins of my notebook back in 2015. It was a figure with a screen or a box for a face. So I started there. The doodle eventually became my head in a TV screen.
It then became the issue of what to put on the screen. I decided on a few things that reminded me of myself, or that I felt emotionally close to. The easiest screen to pick was a moth, an insect that I am fascinated by (which turned out to be harder to code than expected). It took a few tries but I eventually settled on something I really liked. (The curvy one on the left was the first draft, while the sharper, striped one on the right is the final draft.)
The next screen I did was a manila folder with my name on it. For the past year-ish I’ve written a horror monologue series for Midnight Cabaret called The Myles Fyles. I’m more proud of those pieces of writing than any others I’ve ever done, and I figured a file would be a good way to preface the multiple screens to follow it. Next came the umbrella, because I always feel best when its raining. The last screen I designed was the mushrooms. I also study biology, and my main interest area is mycology. I also just think they’re interesting to look at. I don’t have in-progress photos of these because the design only went through one iteration.
The final little element to my self portrait was a way to highlight the more literal picture of me. So I went with another bug: a lightning bug.
In my sketchbook, I mostly worked on problems that surprised me with their complexity: the moth, my hair, and the lightning bug. It turned out to be far more difficult to turn bugs and the shape of my hair into forms that I could use for this portrait. Moth’s wings are usually curved in irregular forms that were practically unattainable. The solution to this problem became forgoing the curves altogether and doing a sharper and more stylized moth. The lightning bug was complex in ways I did not expect because I wanted it to be at an angle. This, in hindsight, was a bad idea. It ended up taking a lot of pure trial and error before any of the bug looked good. The final problem was my hair, which does not follow any regular shapes and trying to sharpen it looked wrong in comparison to the rest of my head. It eventually took four arcs to finally get something even close to my actual hair.
