Double Portrait - Part One

I've challenged myself to do a double portrait of my husband.  I took a picture of him looking into a mirror while we were vacationing in Yellowstone National Park.  

We've stayed at the historic lodge at Old Faithful Geyser several times and love the rustic rooms and the architecture of the building.  If I'd had my way when I was younger, I would have liked living in a log cabin in the forest somewhere.  Now that I'm older, I prefer living near the resources that old people need - like medical, social groups, family, and friends.  So, I live out my fantasy while on trips, and much prefer rustic lodges to fancy hotels.

Well, back to the topic.  I liked the picture because it reminded me of one done in 1960 by Norman Rockwell, when he was looking into a mirror and painting a self portrait. 

I used the posterizing method of taking the picture into Photoshop, where you change the image to gray scale, then blur the edges.  That image was traced and enlarged and became my pattern.  I picked blue fabrics for his shirt, and light flesh tones for his head.  Here are two sections cut and fused and ready to assemble.

I didn't trace enough accurately to do his face, and tried to draw them to scale on the pattern.  But, my drawing skills are horrible and I couldn't get his eyes and nose correctly.  If it wasn't a portrait of somebody that I know, I could have just winged it.  But it had to actually look like him and not a characterization.  So, I took the picture back into Photoshop and enlarged just his face to the same size as the pattern, then traced that and overlayed it onto the posterization to get the 4 shades placed in the right spots.  Believe me when I say that these design details stretch my brain - both during the day and at night when they keep me awake.

I have a lot of supplies to do this type of work, but ran out of Teflon coated poster boards after I had only done 2 sections.  My solution was to use parchment paper taped to a couple of other poster boards instead of buying more Teflon pressing sheets. (It's not likely that I will need more than 2 boards in the future.)  Anyway, here are the reflection parts of his shirt and his face.

I hope you like it so far!