Self Portrait

Self Portrait

To start off I need to include a disclaimer.  I have never worked on a Mac or with Photoshop.  I found it very challenging.   So with this in mind, here's the background on my self portrait.  I feel that we, as humans, are constantly changing.  My portrait is a snapshot of my current life experience and as a result there are many things happening in this creation.  Looking at the photo as a whole it appears to be a random mishmash of color with a ghostly image.  Looking closer at the photo you will notice images from my life,  both responsibilities and blessings.  I am a single parent, I work full-time and I am now taking classes here at WSU in addition to receiving on going training in my profession.  Having so many things going on I have started to feel that I am losing a bit of myself.  Thus the ghostly image of myself in black and white.  I layered colored images atop to identify whats causing me to lose a bit of myself (work, school, home repairs, cooking, cleaning, parenting, the list goes on) and also images that are feeding my soul and keeping me forging forward (my child and our family pets).  Lowering the opacity of all the photos allowed me to blend images together giving a cleaner overall effect.  I kept the edges of the photos hard and straight in order to allow each overlapping image to be view more clearly by the eye when the scrutinizing each picture.  This also applies to the layers of my life as where one thing ends another has already begun.  The colors I used in the images were primarily red/purple/pink and yellow/orange/green.  This tied the feel of the overall portrait image together.  I was able to bring a green color from one of the photos through the black and white image of myself which changed the portrait eye color to green, which is my eye color.

My hope is that this self portrait is able to communicate a bit of who I am, at this moment in time, in a way that is subtly accented by the colors in my life.