My Final Image

Below you can see my final image of me wearing my mask. It turned out much better than expected, through the photo I wanted to show a bit of my true personality and the fact that I can be quite introverted sometimes. By using the character of an anteater for the mask, my aim was to highlight the fact that me and the anteater had something in common, were both weird looking animals that don't always fit in well. 

I also wanted to be photographed in my bed as this is were I've spent a lot of my time recently, eating food and watching Netflix. I like that you can see a lot of my belongings in the photo as well as I think you can get a pretty good idea of what someone is like by looking at the objects that they surround themselves with. The final photo has quite a personal, candid feel to it which reflects my honest personality. 

Overall I think that the photo is a success at showing a bit more about one side of my personality although there are many more sides that this photo can't show.

Production Process

I started the process by cutting out my main anteater shape from card and making sure there were no sharp edges. Then I painted it all over with a grey shade and waited for it to dry. While it was drying I cut out the shapes for the tongue and the glasses. I did this using the same card and the painted them both base-layer white. Then once the head had dried I added in the details like the eyes and the snout using a mix of watercolour pencil and maker pen. 

Then I painted the tongue a pink colour and added the tongue line in marker. I chose to have the tongue pointing down so that it would work well with the composition of my end photo (I wanted the anteater to be eating or drinking something). 



  

Then I painted the glasses with watercolour paint to look like the tortoise shell ones I wear. Then I added some rosy cheeks to the Anteater to make it look more stylised and give it more of a character.










After this I assembled the mask, sticking the tongue on the the snout and sticking the glasses down with glue. I was really happy with the outcome but due to the cartoon style I was a bit worried that people wouldn't know what it was.

Initial ideas and development

Today we started our first studio practice activity, which was to make a mask of our self. At first I really panicked at this idea and thought I'd be really embarrassed making things in front of people but after about 5 minutes I had to let it go. As you can see from my sketches at first I wanted to go really simple and just make a face that looked vaguely like I think my face appears to others, which is where the smiley or shy looking faces came from. But after I realised that these things didn't really seem to reflect me that well, I decided to get a bit silly with it and started playing around with different motifs that mean something for me. For example the mug or the book as I love coffee and am always reading. Then I started to think what animal I'd be and which animal appears to others the same way I feel to others. The two that came to mind were a deer in the headlights (for obvious reasons), and an Anteater because they're a bit weird and awkward. 


The two ideas I liked best were the deer and the anteater because I thought they had the most character. I would have done the deer idea but I didn't think it was very original so I went for the anteater. I tried to refine my sketches a little bit and wanted to make it a little bit cartoonish and fun. Below are my final sketches.