I wanted to draw more faces that were shadowed. So I put on a hooded
sweatshirt (that was black), turned off most of the lights in the room,
used a flashlight to illuminate one side of my face, and took a few
pictures using the laptop's camera. I think put the pictures into
Photoshop and thresholded them so they'd be pure black and white. The two
faces on the left are from that. The arcing cut-off in the left-most face
is from the hood. For the middle face, I tilted my head back and laughed
maniacally and the shadowing is mostly from the flashlight illuminating the
side of my face.
The third face was a bit more complicated. The threshold filter lets
you select the threshold level (where the cut-off is that separates what
will become black and what will become white. As I slid the adjustment
thingy in Photoshop, there were different aspects that were captured,
specifically my face, the inner edge of the hood, and the outer edge.
So I created 3 different threshold images and then loaded them into
photoshop as different layers. I then added a mask to each layer and
"cut out" a chunk in the middle of two of the layers, so the lower layers
could be visible (the top layer had the bigger hole cut to see down to
the middle and bottom layer, the middle layer had a smaller hole since
it only needed to see down to the bottom one).That image showed the
elements of all three of the threshold values that I wanted and I used
that as a reference.
Perhaps this animated
GIF can help. The first frame showed the original color picture.
The second is the thresholded one that has my face, the third has the
inside of my hood, the fourth has the outside, and the fifth has the
combined reference image.
Because some of the in between areas appeared as a pale white and all I
had was white, I improvised a little, with some crash-hatching on the
left side and some stippling (i.e., dots...the word rhymes with nippling,
but I can't really make much of a joke with that, probably because it's
not actually a proper word) on the right. The reference image had some
weird shattered-glass patterns on the top and I liked how that showed a
contour while also kind of looking weird (suggesting magic or wizard or,
well, just weird), so I went with that.
The pointing finger isn't great and can be hard to tell what it's part of.
I hadn't intended the three faces to be part of something, I
just had space on the page. But all in all I'm pretty happy with it. Oh,
and I like how the left edge of the left face is a little ragged suggesting
some texture at the very edge of the light.
The full size image is
here.