Merging Reflections

Pastel pencil on black paper, 44"x19"

This was a piece I made last semester in art class. The assignment was simply to do a self portrait. The thermal-like colors were not in my original plan, but one day it started looking that way and I liked how it was turning out, so I kept working with that color scheme.

I took photos of myself to work from (no tracing whatsoever, only a grid)

The only editing done to the photo I took of this was some very slight brightness/contrast filtering.

If you look closely, you'll see the fingers of the foreground hand are actually merged with the other hand (that's why they look so stubby). I did that out of inspiration from a scene in "The Matrix", when Neo touches the mirror right before he is taken out of the Matrix, and his hand goes into the mirror. I know it will remind some people of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Fresco, but I was only thinking of the Matrix when creating this!