Drawing my self portrait and other things that don't look anything like me

So for my final in Drawing II, I am to draw an expressive self portrait. Sounds easy enough…I know how to draw and I know what I look like, right? Not so. This is by far the hardest thing I have had to do so far in drawing. Even harder than drawing a naked guy singing along to War’s greatest hits and doing warrior poses in the middle of my classroom.

I had 4 days to complete this project. I went out to purchase expensive paper on day one and prepared myself to spend the next day drawing. Day 2 was spent drawing for 8 hours or more. I did some gesture drawings of Ben playing his video game for a while then began the real drawing.

The first drawing looked like an alien corpse…the second was better, but didn’t have any expressive quality to it. After trying to revive the alien corpse for a couple more hours, I gave up. I figured I have a 100% so far in the class so if I turned in an alien corpse as my self portrait, things would be right in the world.

I woke up on day 3 at 6:30am. I had a vision of my final critique. It consisted of the alien corpse hanging on the wall and someone asking me “What does this drawing say about you?” The only honest answer I could think of is that the Alien corpse said “I am lazy and willing to settle for less than the best because I am tired and just good enough to get by” This simply would not do because I demand the best of myself and refuse to let my fellow students believe that I cannot conquer the self portrait.

I spent most of Day 3 wrestling with the fact that I was either going to have to re-do the self portrait, or show the alien corpse to my classmates. Around 6:30pm, I was watching my favorite show “Ace of Cakes”, at one point Duff was talking about his staff and how they are artists and have to make stuff or they go crazy. It was at that moment, I knew that laying in bed at 6:30pm watching a television show about artists making wonderful cakes was not what I needed to be doing. I had to get up to the studio and make stuff…stuff like a self portrait.
It is now 10:00pm on day 3 and I have a decent start on a new self portrait. It looks human and resembles someone who might be related to me. It may not be me, or be all that exciting, but mark my words; the self portrait battle does not end here. I will beat the self portrait. IF I don’t beat it within the time frame allotted, I will do so on my own.