After the first week of creating work, I started to feel lost. I had a good few days that I felt stressed and was unsure of where to go next with my work. I have since been doing a lot of contextual research to help inspire me, as well as creating a few doodles of my edited photographs using acrylic and pen.

The images above gave me the idea to spend more time editing, but this time using photographs of myself. As mentioned in my previous post, I had initially attempted to use myself in photographs but felt unhappy with the results. To work around this, I started to edit myself to distort my appearance, using selfies taken throughout lockdown. I wanted to stick with the theme of digital glitches, so incorporated this through colour. These selfies, collected from March to now, are often my own way of documenting myself. My intention isn’t always to look nice, but to keep a diary of my appearance. I change how I look a lot through self expression, and thought this would be an interesting depiction of time passing and how much I’ve changed over the past 8 or so months. Below are my edited photographs of myself using Photoshop (slideshow 1) and Hyperspektiv (slideshow 2).

I then drew from these pictures. As much as I like the idea, I think I could have spent more time on some of them as they seem unpolished.

My work is obviously influenced by Cubism, an art movement which began in the early 1900s by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubism is an art style in which reality is reinvented using geometric shapes and line, being the first abstract art style to go against formal and traditional styles. The way I am altering my face links directly to the work of Picasso due to the sharp edges, and distorted, almost unrecognisable subject matter. This is a way of remodelling how I look as a way to cope with the changes in my appearance over this year.