Geometric Portraits

Our new project in GT is to create low poly portraits. Because we are using portraits, we are focusing on facial expressions as well. Facial expressions are universal. They are learned all over the world in the same way. Using facial expressions is a way for people to communicate rather than actually talking and using words. People use facial expressions to show their emotions which make it easy for others to understand how they are feeling. It may sound odd when I say its a way for people to communicate, but it is in a way. For example, if two people are mad at each other, they probably won't want to talk. They might just use an angry glare or expression to communicate to the other that they don't want to talk. 

To create our low poly portraits, we first took a photo of ourselves or our subject. For our first portrait, we took a symmetrical photo of ourselves and opened it in PhotoShop. The we sized the image to fit the requirements. We placed a grid onto the image and drew a red line with the size of 5 pixels straight down the middle of our portraits. We decided to only use the left side of our faces since it was a symmetrical image of ourselves. From there, we traced around the left side of our faces and created an outline of all our facial features, using the 5 pixel red line. The lines had to touch the grid in some way. Then, we filled our faces with triangles. Next, we used the polygonal lasso tool to select a triangle. We then blurred it. We had to outline, select, and trace, every triangle we created. After finally finishing this part of the project, we used the polygonal lasso tool to select our half of our faces that we blurred. Then we copied that and created a new layer. With that layer, we stretched it to the other half of our face so it was symmetrical. Then we made our outlines white, turned on the white background, and turned it in. We also create 2 more low poly portraits, however we take a little bit of a different approach for those. In the second one, we started by using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to create triangles and blur them without an outline.

With the first low poly portrait, we used our own faces and the process was very different from the second one. In the first poly portrait, we outline half of our face using the Line Tool in PhotoShop. After doing so, we blurred each triangle on that half of the face. In the second one however, we did not use the Line Tool to outline triangles first. We also did not just do half of the face. We started by using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (L) to create triangles and blur them. We did not use an outline first. We also used a picture that we took of someone rather than ourselves. By adjusting the original image, we created a unique background. In the second image, because we did not use an outline, I found that there were more noticeable gaps without it. Another thing that is different in the second one is that we added in the whole person rather than just hair and face. There are a lot of differences between the two but both and still Low Poly portraits, just created in two different ways.