“My name is Anirudh Bhattacharya and this portrait shows me with my interests. I like reading comics and manga, to the point that the thing that kicked off my journey to become “great” was the dream of becoming a comic book artist. However, today I find myself interested in a lot more career options than just being a comic book artist, like video game concept art, animation and 3D sculpting, among a hundred other things. I like science fiction and fantasy, and am obsessed with anatomy, even though I haven’t come anywhere close to being fluent in using it in my artwork despite loads of practice.”

This assignment served almost as an update to my general self-portrait, in the sense that at some point or another, I’ve tried to make one to represent the mind behind my work and all that inspires it. I had a similar exercise to do at the beginning of my first unit, although the result of it was far more untamed and not completely thought through.

As one can see, it is actually quite a random choice of hobbies, as well a bunch of things from around my house. And some other stuff. There was a reason for this: at the time, I was in a phase of my journey where I was still quite taken by the work of Kim Jung Gi, a korean artist and draftsman known for his knack for perspective and integrating a complex plethora of very accurately drawn objects into his artwork while maintaining a strong and consistent sense of perspective throughout the artwork. It was his style I was trying to emulate back then. However, as I continued to make more work, I began to seperate myself from the product and understand the principles and process behind it. In acknowledging those principles, I started to put less effort into improving my skills and focus more on simple, straightforward and interesting ways of approaching a problem. And thus, I began working on the new self-portrait.

While I do use my sketchbook for drafting an artwork a couple of times before starting the final sketch, I didn’t use it this time because I had a pretty clear image of what sort of an image I wanted to end up with, so I started simply with a rough outline of the character. In keeping it simple I didn’t put much thought into thinking about where I was taking inspiration from, and invariably resorted to my obsession with anime and comic book superheroes from DC and Marvel. This ended up subconsciously including a pair of bulky boots, similar to Astroboy; a katana-like item hanging from the belt similar to Samurai or warriors in general; a larger sword-like item fitted at the back on a belt that runs diagonally across the torso, popularly related to Cloud Strife from the Final Fantasy franchise and Guts from the manga Berserk; a gauntlet or a bulky arm on one side as seen in designs of the Infinity Gauntlet and Hellboy.

After the outline, I began sketching out the character, improvising in a lot of parts, like the Xbox 360 controller hanging from his hand and a box of pencil lead disguised as an ammo carrier. The idea behind designing a character like this was that I always saw art as a fight of some kind, against technical challenges like anatomy or in getting my name out there as an illustrator or graphic designer. And my weapons are my tools that I use to fight in those challenging situations, simple things like my trusty mechanical pencil, my brush, my games that help me cope with all of it mentally (and of course a reference to a dream of mine to become a concept artist for games), and my sketchbooks. Beyond a point, I stopped including stuff because I’d start overthinking it. The drawing process took surprsingly long but it turned out neater than what I usually end up with. All of this happened on photoshop, and for the drawing I used the Happy HB brush from Kyle’s Drawing Box, a collection of brushes Adobe added to Photoshop some years ago. And since I since I graduated from the bamboo pad to the Cintiq last year, the process has gotten a lot easier.

The next step was adding colour. I didn’t go with a very saturated colour set, mainly because it suits my character better, I know better than to go completely wild with colours. I went something that suggested simplicity and “rawness”, rather than bright and refined.

I then added light and shadow to the character, placing the light source above. Although, again, I didn’t feel the need to make the contrast so high that it becomes incredibly dramatic, which is something I usually do. I recently began using a dark-ish shade of purple for shadows instead of black; purple seems to retain that sense of visual positivity you’d expect to see in a cartoon, a simple change that I really liked when I started using it in my process.

I finished the artwork with a final layer for lights, adding light to the boots, the controller and the ammo case. I will admit, I’m not very happy with the lights, but I’m not entirely sure why I don’t like them. Still, they were part of the plan so I really felt the need to add them in the end anyway.