As I brainstormed materials, I considered using buttons, stamps, magazine clippings, and broken pieces of chalk. I ended up using fabric to create my nontraditional portrait. I had a huge variety of fabrics to use, and they wouldn't cost me anything, so it was easy to acquire the materials to work with. Also, fabric and textile design have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and I figured it was fitting to create a self portrait out of fabric. (My mom has had a design studio in our bonus room since I was eight.)
Fabrics have many different thicknesses, contents, patterns, textures, and weaves. Those variations grew to represent the many different parts of myself and how people can change and evolve over time. They show that no one is ever purely anything, and that we are all conglomerates of many characteristics, emotions, and experiences.
Using fabric made my piece more time consuming than some of my other choices, but I had so much fun working with it. My use of fabric made the colors of my portrait somewhat blocky and indistinct. That fact makes the portrait look better from farther away.
The risks I took with this project were mostly to do with finding the correct colors for the different parts of my portrait. While creating it, I was really worried that it would turn out horribly, but I'm very glad I stuck with this idea as it turned out wonderfully!
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