May Already (Even for the Other Side of the International Dateline)

I've been weaving this very scarf for... ever. An hour a day should give me around 30cm, but a week-plus on, I have only 120cm, so what's wrong with my math?? I had hoped to finish it yesterday, but today, I think it'll take two more sittings.

The cloth part is looking lovely, showing different colors in different lights, but the selvedges in some parts look like the Wild Wild West with gunfights and tumbleweed. I don't know if it will make a merchandise.

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During April, I tried to do a "self portrait" every day, though some days I had to make up for the missing days, and I still haven't done one for April 30. They are not serious attempts, mind you, and the project was not as onerous as I had expected. 

This is the kind of portraits I intended to work on, i.e. the body shape (!!!), but in more details and various styles, (of drawing). I did a lot of half-blind gesture-contours with pencils, color pencils, charcoal and conte; also some digital manipulation of photos, (but not of drawings, I wonder why,) a collage of my drawing, and when I was really tired, I scanned/printed photos and drawings and colored them in.

I ended up with quite a few closeups of face, face parts, or hand, the main reason being I often drew these plonked in front of a small mirror and as the last task for the day.

The problem with a small mirror was I couldn't seen the whole face in focus so drawing one part at a time made the face out of proportion. I think the eyes were most often much larger than in real life. Resulting face shapes and the impression one gets from the face is inaccurate, (if an impression can be inaccurate,) and proportion being my biggest weakness, practicing every day didn't help me improve.

And this was my best-effort, goody-two-shoes style. (4B pencil on pink paper.) I think my face is even wider and shorter, and this looks more like my mother than me. Working on inexpensive cartridge paper in funky colors helped me not take the project seriously and choosing the color of the paper was often the best part of the evening.

I'm getting my April stuff bound at the copy place; that's my thing now, compiling bits of paper and getting them bound with the recovered/recycled binding material. The bound "books" give me the satisfaction of fishing projects, albeit small.

I'm following an old Design Study guideline and continuing on a similar theme of "Self" in May, (though I didn't do anything yesterday.) I'm expanding the definition of my subject, so I may even manipulate (destroy?) printouts of famous self-portraits. Come to think of it, I should list ways I could manipulate images before I forget. I'm not sure if this is going to lead me to the collaborative piece for the October exhibition.