Peter is going of

Self-portrait artist statement

A self-portrait is a picture of oneself. It can be made as a drawing or as a picture, taken with a camera. The self-portrait oftentimes expresses feelings of the person, describe things that happened in the past or dreams they have and they want to achieve. Those ideas are not always that clear. The spectator has got to interpret the picture and has got to have a closer look.

            My self-portrait shows my head and a part of my shoulders. The whole picture is on fire, my hair is made of flames and my face is glowing. With this self-portrait I wanted to express how I am “on fire” in many different ways, in different situations in life. First of all it describes my character. My character is like fire. I am explosive, aggressive and moody. Fire has all these characteristics as well, it can be very calm but it can also be destructive and aggravating. My angry face expressions are strengthening those feelings. Another way the fire delineates me is that when I am playing basketball I am “on fire”. That is meant metaphorically, I am not really on fire. I am just playing so well and hitting so many shots that I am really feeling it. Basketball players call this status “on fire”.

            I took this picture with the camera of my iPhone 5. It was a classic “selfie” and obviously not that special. I did not make the basic of the picture that special because I knew exactly what I was about to do and I knew that I was going to use Photoshop to make the picture special. So I copied the picture into Photoshop and started to edit my picture. First I had to copy the picture in multiple layers. I edited those layers in different kind of ways to get my result. I worked with the different filters, the opacity and the styles. After I set up my picture in the right ways I pasted a picture of flames to set my head on fire. I pasted the flames in a new layer, edited the filter to make it look more realistic. Then I had to “warp” the flames to get them in the shape of my head (got to edit-> transform -> warp).  Now I had the outline for my self-portrait, the problem was that my face and also my expressions were not visible. I took the white pen and redraw the lines of my face (eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows and facial features). Thanks to the editing to the editing of the filters this white was shining in a bright, yellowish flame-color. To get the final product we went to the darkroom with out printed negative forms of the picture and I set the timer on 10 seconds to receive my photogram.