Updated Self Portrait

Various projects called for an updated self portrait and I decided this would be an ideal opportunity to practice more with digital painting!

I needed a new avatar to update my logo, marketing & such so I started with that.

As I was working on this I was also formulating a plan for the marketing artwork to be used for my upcoming art tour.

While I continued to work on the artwork and design for these things, Girls Drawin’ Girls was organizing their group art drawing prompts for 2018.

They’ve opted to do multiple monthly subjects vs. a specific subject each week.

For January they did one subject and it was “Where are you from?”

It was nearly too good to be true, but the artwork I had already been working on for these other projects was going to be the perfect jump-off for creating my submission!

It was time for a new self-portrait anyhow.

The only one I’ve done so far was back in 2015. This painting was one of the first attempts I had made at creating a character based off someone from real-life and since it was myself, I found it helped me tremendously in doing this for others going forward! It brought me many custom character commissions to follow, too!

This piece is especially rewarding for me to reflect back on for more reasons than that. It was also one of the first attempts I made at shading & adding dimension to my people- prior to this I was doing silhouettes and only recently had done a couple that were flat & solid flesh color, more comic-like. It was also one of the first people I painted with paint-pens, which I have used for most all my character artworks created since!

Since I need more practice with digital painting and I’m also hoping to get a few digital art commissions, I decided to use all of the above as a reason to also utilize this opportunity to create my updated self portrait.

 It includes the artwork from the various projects I’ve been working on over the last month mentioned here, and the “Where are you from” theme rings true with both the reflection of where I live now & where my hometown is as well as the colors & stars. I chose the colors to represent “Purple Mountains Majesty” and “Amber Waves of Grain”, the Northwest to the Midwest. I added the galactic stardust to represent my personal beliefs.

Having done this, now I can easily create various custom logo & avatar renderings for myself! Like this Valentine’s Day one I made!

I’ll be finishing the final flyer for “Best Coast” as soon as I have all the locations & dates confirmed- be sure you’re subscribed here to my blog for updates!

Thanks always for reading!

Much love,

Mindie

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