Illustration - Working Methods, Week 3: Imaginary You

Our homework this week was to create a piece called 'The Imaginary You,' which is supposed to be a portrait of yourself as an imaginary being. I was going for Doppleganger at first, but then I'd thought I'd do myself as my computer. I spend all day in front of one at work, then I'm at it at various points in my free time as well, and at times I feel so attached to my computer that I may as well have one chained to me. In the end, I somehow combined the two ideas into one, and had my Doppleganger inside the computer, and my presumed normal self attempting to escape.

The piece is A1 size (OMG>HUGE!). The photos were manipulated and pixelated in Photoshop, then collaged onto the paper. The simple line drawings were done with a black Sharpie, and the Space Invaders with red, blue and green Sharpies. There are a few actual wires glued in the heavily wired area, but you'll probably not be able to see them. Also invisible is the graph paper I glued to the area below the normal me, then peeled off, leaving a sort of ghost image of graph paper. Didn't really work as well as I'd hoped, but the effect worked in the end.

I had fun creating this piece. The challenge for me this week was practicing restraint, as my instructor told me she wanted me to come to class with an 'unfinished' piece, in complete contrast to my finished painting of the previous week. Ironically, this piece took nearly as long as the painting. Perhaps that was due to the sheer size of it.

My instructor thought it was clever, which was a huge compliment. Her only criticism was that because of the strong colours in the top left, I should have used the colours again throughout the image so as to draw the eye around. Right now the eye is drawn continuously up to the Space Invaders.