 I'm Janet Fagan and today we are going to be using the portrait as a way to explore self-expression and identity. So we're going to be using materials that you can make yourself or that you probably have on hand at home and will need to be in a place where you can see a reflection of yourself and hopefully have a good light source on one side of your face. I'm sitting in front of a big mirror here and you can see that I have a light coming from my right side. You can go into your bathroom if you like sit in front of the mirror in there if you have a lamp that you can pull in there with you to create a light maybe turn off all the other lights except for the lamp. Even a hand mirror will work well if you can prop it up on something to keep it steady while you're drawing. That's a great tool or a makeup mirror maybe on the stack of books or something to keep that handy. The other things that you're you're going to need you're going to need some paper that you can that you can work on a couple of sheets. I also have part of a paper bag here that I'm going to be using. You might want to get that ready and then you'll see that I also have several piles of different colors that I've cut out from magazines so make sure these are magazines that nobody's reading or wanting to look at again but I have I have separated the colors into reds oranges and yellows or warm colors blues greens and purples or cool colors and then some darks just to make them a little bit easier to find. The other thing that I've done as a way to prep my materials is I've done some I've done some writing. So this is just different thoughts that I've had pieces of poems that I've written some stream of consciousness thinking just words that are meaningful to me and I've taken colored pencils a regular pencil and a magic marker and just put them in different blocks trying to use different handwriting different ways to make these blocks of texts feel feel different. I have a I have a couple of light ones for areas where I may want to have a little more light and then I have some deeper darker ones for areas where I may want to show some some darker areas or some shadows. So if you want to prepare that or you can look for text from other sources this is just a page and index out of an old atlas that is actually out of date because the world has changed since this atlas was created and so I was able to pick it up at the Goodwill for just a couple of bucks and I've had it for a long time I use it every now and then and I just decided to pull a page out that represents Seattle so Seattle is on this index page and that's where I'm from. So there you have it some materials to get us started and then once you're set up in front of your mirror with your light you're going to start with just some really general observing and get this hand mirror out of the way. So I'm just using a number two pencil here and this will work just fine for you. You're also going to need scissors today and a glue stick. So observing I'm looking at myself I'm looking at myself head on and I'm just going to create a very simple line drawing of myself because what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a line drawing and then I'm actually going to cut it up and I'm going to cut out the shapes that I find to create positive and negative shapes that I can then turn into collage elements and stencils. So I'll show you what I mean about that in a minute but first I'm just going to take some time to sketch out a very simple likeness of myself so I'm starting with a big oval for my head and then a cylinder for my neck line for my shoulders a line suggesting the scoop of my t-shirt that I have on and then I'm going to just give myself a little bit of help keeping things organized in my drawing with a proportion map so I made a center line top to bottom a center line again from side to side to just give me a guide where my glasses are going to fall and then a center line representing the bottom of my nose between the eye line and the chin and then one more center line for my mouth between the bottom of the nose and the chin. Okay so I'm going to start I'm going to start with my glasses because they're they're giant and I can see them really well and they make a big a big shape so just starting with the bridge sketching out the big shape of my glasses this will come into into playing a little bit and then I'm going to look at the just the outline of my nose not worried about the details I just want very very very simple shapes so what I see is the the side of my nose flares out into the sides of my nostrils and then the bottom of my nose is kind of a wave making room for my nostrils and then the bottom of the ball of my nose which comes down my mouth I'm going to look at it closed and not moving so I can get a feel for what the outline of my mouth looks like okay so just really simple top and bottom lip I'm extending my chin just a little bit because I got kind of a little bit off track from my proportion lines there so I need a little more length for my chin and now I'm going to look at the big patterns of light on my face I see there's a big pattern of light on the side here it goes down behind my glasses and then I'm noticing that my hair is a shape kind of goes off the page like so kind of triangular away from my head and then come my hair comes in defining the side of my face so I'm getting these lines here along the side of my face that are defined by the hair okay and I'm going to go over this drawing a little more carefully now because I'm going to cut it all out in just a second and I want to make sure I know where to cut now that I have my my drawing outlined and emphasized I'm going to go ahead and and cut it out and I'm going to just show you an example of what we're aiming for this is an example that I did at home just to give you an idea of where we're going with this so you can see here that this is the the negative shape of my drawing and this is the positive shape of my drawing so the positive shape is actually the what I've drawn the drawing itself and the negative shape is all the space around it and these are going to be our tools for building our portrait so the first step is not to not to cut it out to this degree the first thing I want to do is cut out just the outline or the silhouette and you'll see why in a sec so I'm going to just do that now got my silhouette cut out and I'm just looking at the paper that I brought with me and I am going to use this brown paper and you'll see I did the same thing when I made the demo and this is this is the cut out so I'm going to cut out the shape of my silhouette from the brown paper so I'm just laying it flat I'm going to give it a nice dark outline use this paper as my working paper and collage this on like so as a starting point but I think I'm more interested in this so I'm going to pick this up and use this as my background and that's already starting just with that just with that addition I'm starting to tell the viewer a little bit about myself with this portrait so it's starting to already have a little bit of self-expression in it just with the choice of the background the color that I'm using for my head and face and you're gonna whoops can't hang on to the glue stick and you are going to have a lot of these fun choices to make as you go so everything that you add can share can share a little bit about who you are how you see the world what you think is important things that you would like people to know about you this art is a super effective way to communicate about who we are and what we care about to the world sometimes it's easier to make a piece of visual artwork with a message that is meaningful to us rather than to actually speak the words to someone so it's a great way to express yourself okay so next step I've got my silhouette on my background now I want to start building in the features that I have in my drawing and the way that I'm going to do that is I'm going to cut them out just like I did in the demo and I'm going to show you where we're going with this so this is this is the demonstration that I did yesterday and you can see I had my hair up but it's the the idea is using text that has meaning using colors to define yourself and you want to as your as you're expressing your identity in your portrait you always want to have in the back of your head that you're making a you're making a piece of artwork and you want it to be harmonious so that the choices that you make should flow together in a way that your whole composition is united and we'll talk about that more as as we go but you can see here for example I use this dark blue to float through the composition and carry the eye from the top to the bottom and side to side and also choosing the the text in the background really helps to pull things together too and also actually gives me more leeway to use more variation in the face if I have something unifying the whole composition okay so I'm going to cut out all of the individual shapes here so that I have them to work with this is where the fun part happens because you get to start making those creative decisions how you want to define yourself here so I am excited to use the text that I created so I'm just going to think for a second how do I want to show though I think I'm going to go with because I want to draw attention to my eyes I'd like to emphasize them so I'm going to go with a color that has a good attractive quality and that's red so I'm going to go into my red text and I'm going to lay my my eye shape over the top of the red text and I'm going to cut out the red text for my eye shape so to make that a little bit easier I'm just going to go into the text and separate it from the other blocks of text and the other thing that I'm going to do to make it a little bit easier is I'm going to flip it over so that I can trace not on the text itself but on the back so I've also flipped over my my template or my shape at the same time because you want them both to be facing the same way so you don't get a reverse of that shape I want to do just to sort of orient myself is I'm going to go for the big shape of the hair and so looking at my reflection in the mirror I know that the light is coming from one side so I'm going to try and emphasize that so just to make things a little bit more straightforward so that I can start to see where I am I'm just going to take my pencil and I'm going to outline the edges here and then once I do that I can see where I want the color to go so I'm going to start with some light on the right side and some deeper darks on the left and I'm just going to have fun building this so I'm just laying it in right now just so I can get a sense for how I want to cut it so now I'm just going to take a few minutes and and fill in the hair and get that I want it by shaping the edges a little bit to match what I have in my drawing doesn't have to be perfect I'm just thinking of big general terms right now you can always tighten things up later but for now just keeping it really nice and loose idea for how you can go back and forth between tracing out your templates to give details of your features and then using your templates just to spatially show you how to fill in different areas so if I go back and look at the the finished demo you'll notice that I'm just hitting a few key shapes and I'm even going back in and drawing with the marker to kind of pull things together so it's really up to you how you determine you know what do you want to emphasize in the piece that I'm working on now I'm emphasizing the colors in the hair and what I see through my vision which is a poem that I had written yesterday in this piece I'm emphasizing the the color in the nose the highlight here and then really the the pattern in the hair of the of the bricks echoing sort of the pattern down here in the body of the of me of the person so this is something that you can sit with you can think about what the right choices are for you what you want to include maybe you want to take some time to do some writing away from this for a little while to think about introducing that element into into your piece in the headband here I have a crow that was a crow so it's a poem about a crow I have a poem that I love that is about one of my favorite birds the crow that I included in the headband and so you can see that it just has a little bit of the text giving just a clue into that so you don't have to tell the whole story but the more glimpses that you can give into what's important to you and who you are this will become a more personal portrait that expresses your identity all right so thanks for exploring this with me and have fun hanging out with your reflection and thinking about these tools and how you're going to put them together