I started this painting very discouraged, but this painting taught me to trust the process. I started this process by painting the entire background blue and then sketching out the sketch of the portrait overtop. I then color blocked the brown for the skin and black for the hair. I followed this by adding shadows to the skin by blending the original brown and darker umber. This is what I found most challenging about this painting. There were a lot of shadows in the skin that took a lot of patience to blend and replicate. Another challenging part of the process was replicating the texture of the hair. I don’t believe I got it 100% accurate, but I did my best to make the hair textured with a little frizz to it. To create this look I replicated a video I watched where the artist demonstrated the technique of using small amounts/drier paint to make the frizzy edges of the hair.

For this project we were asked to use inspiration from one artist. The artist I chose was Kehinde Wiley. What I enjoy most about his work is the patterned backgrounds paired with the beautiful portraits of people. My version of this included a self portrait of myself with a background filled with cherry blossoms. I chose the background of cherry blossoms because they are a representation of my hometown DC. The flowers have to be my favorite part of the portrait. They bring another dimension to the painting. Although, they did take a long time to complete due to the many layers I had to apply in order for the light pink to be opaque. Overall, I really enjoyed creating this piece and pushing through to the end. Something I will be taking away from this painting into the next is that I should add both highlights and shadows while blending, not just shadows. I am excited to see how I push myself further in the final painting of the semester.