Butterfly and Shark - a self portrait.

I have already drawn and painted many portraits. My biggest project here was painting 12 characters from the early Harry Potter Films. While I have painted these portraits I realized that the character appears to get hold of me, which was a bit scary. I thought I would never paint a person I know personally in this intense way, nor would I paint me.
Yet, when thinking about doing a collage of a person after a black and white photography I decided to take photographs of myself and to try a self-portrait.

 I did not know that this work will be so demanding. I cut out snippets of a black and white newspaper for hours and arranged them after the values of the photograph. Then I realized that, if I will go on like this, the result will be a boring picture, like another photograph, just a bit out of focus. I decided to change the approach and looked for something to give the picture more vitality. I found two images of a butterfly and a shark and added them to the picture.
Then I covered the remaining surface of the paper with strokes of a light blue and a grey marker which improved the collage in a way that I knew it is time to stop working on it.

Apart from the long time I had to work on the collage to make it something interesting, it also was an adventure to look at myself in this intense way. To see how my nose or eyes look like was one thing, but I also got a kind of new relation to myself. It was like being together with a person for a long time without saying anything, but you definitely drew nearer to that person.

This post was inspired by an assignment of an art online course.