Adobe Photoshop Self Portrait

For this portrait I decided to make flowers coming out from inside my face. The flower pictures are all taken by myself or my friends and I chose them because my friends and I love flowers and exchanging pictures of flowers so adding them is personal and sentimental to me.  “Flowers make us feel more cheerful, energetic, and optimistic” (Caryl Pomales, 2019) and that is what I wanted to capture in my portrait as I am an optimist and generally happy person. In photoshop I added each individual flower and separated my face into two segments. After experimenting with different compositions, I decided upon a few flowers in the background and foreground to balance out the flowers in my face. I tried to match the background flowers with my purple hair to create a more cohesive portrait. The background is a page from one of my favourite books, ‘six of crows’ and I decided to use it as I love reading so the background works perfectly. . 

This photoshop portrait was inspired by surrealism. I loved the composition of Margrittes paintings, especially by the paintings that had covered faces with different objects. “Artworks from or inspired by this movement have a certain playfulness with dreamlike elements and whimsicality – a freedom to express without control.” (The Artling team, 2024) This is the response I wanted from my poster so this inspired me to try an oppositional approach and instead focus fully on my face and make a portrait which is surreal but also a clear representation of me. I decided to crop out elements of pictures of my face in photoshop and compose them all into one surreal portrait. I used pictures of my nose, mouth eyes and even jewelry to create this portrait and decided to make it black and white. The gradient background brings a clear focus to the portrait as it points to the center of the image. 

This is the image in particular that inspired me to create this surreal poster due to the visible but also obstructed face.