This is my piece a self-portrait that expresses a specific mood of part A the required projects.

 

My piece is titled Epiphany and it’s a self portrait. The piece is very bright with the pink background and what you can’t really tell from photos is that the stars are all very reflective and so is the water that I painted. As I used a very glossy gel medium over the water to make it keep its reflective shine as it dried down. I tried to keep it pretty realistic to the best of my abilities but some of the shading on the bits under water get a little more colorful with purple. The story behind my piece was that I wanted to create something with some sort of emotion but not an easy one to guess of the bat. That’s why I felt that epiphany was an appropriate title because the mood I wanted to depict was a sort of realization. Although it may seem as if she’s slowly going deeper under water I see it more as coming out of the water and breaking the surface. As if a sudden moment of revelation or realization that happens in a instant. This piece I’ve grown to really like as I worked more on it especially when I decided to be daring and completly paint over the face to start over. But I feel the bold and pretty terrifying move paid off well in the end as it’s way more realistic and nicely done than it was originally. And the reason for me wanting to start over was that I learned how to paint with oil paints significantly better than acrylics recently. I was finally able to understand color theory and mixing a bit better so it seems much more life like than the original one toned face. My references for this piece were mainly my own photography. I took the picture for the piece in a bathtub colored with pink food dye and some star stickers, although I wish it was better quality all I had at the time was my iPhone  on selfie mode held carefully above the water. Some of my inspiration for the piece came from my favorite contemporary artist Ivan Alifan whose work I really admire as it has the fun textures and qualities I love but still posses a sorts of realism. Another smaller bit of inspiration came from Pinterest when I found a cute picture with the star stickers everywhere and I knew I just had to do something similar.