Student 34

December 14, 2000

Through doing a self portrait project, you can really get a good feel of what your personality is really like. You may start out thinking that you are one personality, but at the end of the project you may see through the lines you made or colors you used that your personality is totally different. Through Dr. Farrar's and Dr. Vess' discussions you should be able to accurately identify shapes, colors, and lines that identify your own personality.

A self portrait can also let you see elements in your life you may need or want to change. For instance, through doing my project, I saw that I have a lot of red and orange which is my hot-tempered side. This may mean that I need to become more cool-tempered and more mild-mannered. Or it could let you see things you need to add to your life. I may want to add a bit of jagged lines to my life, which mean that I want to be more on the edge, and not so boring.

When I started brain-storming about what I wanted to do for my project, I immediately thought that I wanted to incorporate sports into it somehow. I decided I could maybe use sports' objects as my actual facial features and even make them mean things at the same time. The eyes on my face are represented by baseballs which are white with a streak of red. This shows that I do have a cool-tempered side with certain people, but even they can see my temper.

My nose is represented by an orange basketball with black stripes. This shows my temper, but still I am seen as down-to-earth. Both my eyes and nose are both circles, which show the wholeness in my life. My mouth is shown as an orange and black football with the orange being on the top. This shows that I do not always use a down-to-earth personality when speaking. I sometimes speak out the minute I get upset with someone, and I know I should use my dudu side and be down-to-earth. All of my facial features are 3-dimensional, which show that I do have a very complex personality.

The boards themselves that the project is fixed on are not equal, which I believe show the unevenness in my life and how things can get crooked very quickly. I used a few different colors and types of lines to show different sides to my personality. The main colors on my project are orange and red. This is my hot-temper. I can be very blunt and up-front with people when they start to annoy me. This is shown as the background for the entire project through using straight, vertical lines. The straight, vertical lines show that I am dependable and a steady person most of the time. Also mixed in with the orange and red are a stripe of brown and black. This shows that I do normally stay down-to-earth and get what needs to be done finished on time.

The next layer consists of light blue spirals. The light blue is the only light color on the entire project, because I am not a very cool-tempered person. Many of my friends told me that I did not need this color on it at all, but I know with certain people that I am cool-tempered and watch what I say. The spirals express growth and change in my life. I feel I am changing every day, not only intellectually, but emotionally, and spiritually. The final layer of paint was applied in diagonal lines across the entire project. These lines are once again all red and orange. The colors once again express my temper, and this time the diagonal lines show that I am always active and doing something. Some of the lines do appear to be chaotic, because I feel that a lot of the time my life is chaotic. This is also shown through the way there are many different layers of paint. If there would have only been just the background color, it would have been too boring, and my life is never boring.

This project was very fun for me to do, and I even got some friends to help me decide on a couple of color schemes to use and the logic behind them. This showed me things I need to work on in my life, and maybe one day I will do another self portrait and compare the two.

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