6 June 1996 | No Comment  Print |  Email

Background: Actually, this one was done with a mechanical pencil using 0.5 pencil lead, which explains why the darks aren’t that dark and why lines are generally the same width. Granted, you can still get some sharpness out of a mechanical pencil, but not without constantly twisting your wrist. I did this one in one night in high school — when I should have been doing homework. This is, of course, another self-portrait. I liked the idea of the color black being a fathomless darkness. I ran with that idea to give depth and dimension to a seemingly flat surface: my abdomen.

The original idea was to have the skeletons grabbing at my clothes and tearing at my body, which would have made for a much more dramatic image. Regrettably, I was too lazy and too eager to finish the piece to show it off to my friends. So instead, I opted to have the skeletons represent three of my primary emotions at the time: Covetous, Melancholy and Vengeance. It was not one of my better decisions.

Points of Interest

Face: This is actually a pretty good likeness of me. Or rather, it looks like the way I looked at the time. Perhaps I exaggerated the hair, but the screaming face is/was spot on. I modeled facial expressions, using my mother’s cosmetics mirror. It’s one of those circa 1970′s flip-mirrors that have a regular flat mirror on one side and a concave mirror on the other side so you can see just how disgusting your pores are.

Skellies: Considering that I’ve had no formal training in art or anatomy, I think my renderings of skeletons are pretty good. Moreover, I really hate drawing more than one figure in one piece, because one of the figures usually ends up disproportionately bigger than the rest. I think everything turned out alright here.