For my self portrait collage I decided to represent the elements that reflect my life, such as music, my favorite places, sayings, religion, and where I’m from, in tattoo form. I’ve always thought that tattoos are essentially a collage of your life experiences, so I thought that it would be an interesting way to represent them. I decided to keep all of the “tattoos” black and white to represent my engineering way of thinking, and because I think they visually look better. For my background I decided to make a gradient to represent the sun and the water, because the photo was taken at my favorite beach. My biggest challenge was making them look realistic. To do so, I used a lot of shadowing, as well as distortion of the shapes and letters to look more natural on the different parts of the body. I used several images from the internet as well as a few different fonts in the lettering.
Collage:
Image links:
http://www.freepngimg.com/download/music/3-2-music-png-image.png
https://pixabay.com/p-1911052/?no_redirect
https://www.northeastern.edu/communityaffairs/wp-content/themes/CCA.zip/img/boston_skyline_960.png
https://i0.wp.com/freepikpsd.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chest-Tattoo-PNG-Image.png
http://www.duwuxia.com/uploads/anchor/anchor_PNG54.png
http://www.clker.com/cliparts/H/0/I/H/W/W/american-flag-md.png
https://g3.img-dpreview.com/BDC1674149A14A15952B58F13EAA8B69.jpg
The concept you have with the tattooing here is pretty neat! The simple background adds a nice touch, but it does not detract from the central point of the image. The tattoos themselves look well formed as well.
I really like the concept of tattooing yourself to show the important things in your life. A suggestion would be making things the same darkness. For example, the witch and the Massachusetts tattoo especially stand out because they are significantly darker than the others.
Besides the fact that this concept was a great idea for this project, I really like how each element on you looks like it could actually belong. The lighting on each picture is really spot on!
People often use tattoos to show what they feel strongly about, so using it for a project like this is perfect. The tattoos look formed to your body, very convincing.
The idea of having tattoos to represent your interests is really cool. The tattoos fit well and seem pretty natural in the picture nice job. The gradient background adds a nice touch to the image without being overpowering.