Intentions for Self Study

I would like to take a more abstract route for my for my self study project. This past week I have worked on both realistic and abstract portraits but I am straying towards abstraction. For inspiration, I began to look through the work of other artists. One artist whose work I found to be very conceptually pleasing was Chris Johansson. I would like to incorporate some of his style into my self portrait. In order to do this, I am going to be using lots of different colors and textures to put across a vibrant feel in my work. My goal for this project is to create a piece that represents me less with physical attributes, but more with emotional feel. I may even attempt to create a series of pieces and form a set that fits together. I plan on mostly using wood on canvas for my piece and this will allow me to work with multiple different textures in order to create the feel I would like. Overall, I would like to challenge myself to create a work that fully expresses myself without actually implementing any realist work.

Here are some of my sketches from this week: