What makes up a face?

I spent this past weekend working on my entry for the Expression 2 Challenge, which I will be posting here in a couple of weeks.  I am so excited about that project because it pushed me to do something I have been wanting to do --give faces more dimension-- and opened the door to something I had no idea that I could do --make faces that look like a unique person.

So, today I am sort of skipping a step that lead me here so that I can keep my entry to myself for a bit longer, and jump to making portraits.  This is a leap of faith because I only just started this and I have so much to learn, but I think figuring this out will make my die cut vignettes more real and more interesting.

To add to the difficulty, although that wasn't the point, I started with a picture I took of myself.  It helps that I don't really know most of the people who read this blog in my day-to-day life because I took a picture in our messy office, without makeup or my hair styled!  Lots of forehead showing too!

This is the process I took to figure out my face.  As you may know, we don't really know what we look like.  At least I don't.  We don't see ourselves nearly as much as we see our co-workers, spouse, child, and neighbors.  I know generally what I look like, and I certainly recognize myself in a reflection, but to duplicate my features, I had to take a picture.  What I did not want was a paper replica of a portrait; no, I wanted a unique piece of work that looked like me.

I took a picture of myself and then used a reject head that I had sitting on my craft table from my entry.  It is the head from the pie lady on Country Life with her hairdo cut off, cut at 11.5".  I needed a starting place.  I added jowls -too much - see I don't really know what I look like.  Ignoring that for now, I noted my chin, points for the dimensions of my mouth and nose, and added smile lines. 

I hand-cut features and then fit them back on the original photo to test them.  The nose, surprisingly was the easiest part.  Happily, I can say I thought my nose was much larger than it actually is, and I was able to shave some off to get to this point!  I bent the papers to get dimension.

Satisfied, I trimmed away the jowls at bit - this is a family feature that really will get worse, so  I was happy to get to remove some!  I added hair by cutting out a style from Everyday Paper Dolls and then trimmed it down.  And yes, I used a little artistic license and gave myself a hairstyle and covered up some of that forehead!  I mean, come on people, it needed to be done.  I also gave myself some new earrings and a colorful shirt-  next time I'll go designer for sure!

I played around with background colors to see what I liked best.  I have all that fun Circle paper to play with so that's what I grabbed for fun.

In taking pictures, I found that maybe I didn't need to add the cheeks and chin -- maybe just the dimensional nose and the shape of the face would convey identity.  What do you think?

I am excited to try more of these and already see changes that need to be made here to improve.  I just wanted to share what I learned.  Thank you for visiting my blog today!