Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait by Rafid Khan

As you can see, this is my gray-scale portrait-to-color portrait. Let me tell you the process that I went through while making these portraits in Adobe Illustrator. First of all, the biggest I faced while starting this assignment is trying to find a good picture of myself. Normally I don't really take pictures or selfies and when I do it's not really a good one. After so many attempts of trying to take a good picture of myself, I was like "forget it". So on my last selfies, I decided to use them in my assignment. So I cropped my picture so that it somewhat shows mostly my face and neck. I then opened my selfie to Adobe Photoshop and add the grayscale in my selfies by 8 levels. I then saved my selfie as grayscale and then opened it up on Adobe Illustrator. When I got into Adobe Illustrator, I locked up the original photo. The first thing I started drawing with a pen tool and curve tool is the black shades. My intention was to draw from darker shades to lighter shades and have each layer for each shade. However, that didn't happen because when I try to put shade in each layer, it doesn't make the drawing of my eyes and lips visible. So I had to make a change of plan and make a separate layer for the eyes and lips in order to make it draw/visible successfully. The biggest challenge I've faced while drawing this grayscale is the white gaps. When I was trying to draw out each shade, and when I make the original picture invisible, I noticed that there are white gaps in between the shades, so I had to spend some time fixing it with the white arrow. After putting each shade, I made sure that the colors for each is accurate to the original picture. Finally, I've finished my grayscale portrait. I would probably rate it as 8.5/10 as there are some things I could probably improve on such as the colorings. For example, I feel like the brown shades below the nose may have kind of ruined the drawing a little. Otherwise, I still like my grayscale and it turns out to be way better than the original picture of it. For the self-color portrait, I decided to make myself look like a terminator as my glasses could fit in it. So before I made myself look like a terminator, I transform my gray colors into putting actual colors based on my original picture (with colors). After making the colors accurate to my original picture, I then move on with working on the terminator part. I was planning on making myself look like Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator. However, I feel like the terminator part of Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't fit well with my color self-portrait. So instead I decided to use a reference from another terminator which is T-3500, it's basically a terminator version of Travis Scott. So I went on YouTube and search for how to draw T-3500 and clicked on the tutorial video. I then screenshot it and then opened it up on Illustrator in a separate file. I then draw it out with a pen tool. Eventually, I copied the terminator drawing and paste it on my self-color portrait. I had to make it big and align it as it looks small compared to the rest of the drawing. As I aligned it, I realized that my eyes don't work out with the terminator because already have my glasses to rely my eye on. So I decided to delete my eyes so that in this way I end up having sunglasses that hide my terminator's eyes. It ended up looking really nice however I felt that something felt off with my terminator part as it's supposed to be shiny. So instead of using regular colors on my terminator part, I added gradient colors instead which ended up looking really cool going from light gray to darkish gray. It end up looking really nice and I would definitely rate it as 10/10. As you see, this is my Self Portrait reflection.