Fading Identity

Since, due to family matters, I'm still having a hard time finding time for my projects — especially for keeping up this blog, which has turned into a kind of personal log — this post will be pretty short and mainly illustrative.

A while ago, I had downloaded the image above from a service I'm subscribed to, and despite starting several different projects with it, I was never able to come up with something I actually liked.

One day, I decided to give it another shot and used several textures to help me out. Some of them I had used before, and others I think I hadn’t used at all. Here are a few of them:

When I finished working on it (or more accurately, gave up out of exhaustion), I had gotten results that were okay — but not quite what I was looking for. I forgot about the project, and only today, a month later, I finally had time to open it up and look at it with fresh eyes. It was still okay, but just that. I played around a bit more with the textures I already had — changed the order, the blending modes — and new variations started to appear that made me really happy.

More than just a face altered with textures, the results — especially the first one — remind me a bit of how negative space is used in design, with the human figure being less explicit and more suggested. Out of the eight variations, these are the six I liked the most: