Day: October 3, 2005

Well, I’ve made my first attempt at a self-portrait in Gimp. It was kind of fun – it’s been years since I tried doing any drawing/painting, computer or otherwise. The first thing you’ll notice about it is that it’s purple. That wasn’t what I started out intending to do – I was just playing around and wanted a midtone background so I could use both light and dark colours on it. Something like this:

Anyway, I started adding colours for the hair and so on, and found I’d made it very difficult for myself to change the skin colour without fucking the whole thing up. There’s probably a cunning techy way of doing it involving replacing colours, but I didn’t find it. There’s also a brute force way of doing it – painting over the purple with another colour – but I couldn’t face it, today at least. I may use this as a starting point and try to rescue it later, but I think I’ll probably start again on a new version. I’m quite tempted to try a Rembrandt-esque approach – start with a very dark ground and build up the picture with lighter colours. Just to see what it’s like.