Me as Kirsten Dunst

Okay, time for the reveal of my next self-portrait!

I wasn’t too happy about doing the idea for this month, but at least I didn’t have to buy anything! I also wanted to make my mom and step-mom, Teresa, happy. They both suggested Kirsten Dunst because they think I look like her. I’ve had many people tell me this, and I have to agree, but I only wish I had her body… and her tan!

The photo I tried to match is from this “Wimbledon” movie poster:

pinimage

Anyway, since I was planning a visit with my dad and Teresa, I decided to do the photo shoot there too. They have a big white wall in a room that my dad sometimes uses as a photo studio. I knew I would need a bunch of lights coming from different directions, and a bright white background.

It turned out that this was much harder than I had anticipated! The sometimes photo studio is also a sometimes game/ excercise/ storage room, so I ran into some obstacles when trying to position lights around the room. I added as many lights as I had to fill in shadows and highlight as many edges as I could. The lights were all pretty close to how I wanted them, but there always seemed to be some pesky shadow making my life miserable.

When I finally got everything set up well enough, I started posing. I checked the results and realized that I had forgotten about the worst shadows of all! The strings from the tennis racket!  This is when I called in my good ol’ pa for some assistance. I had him pose with the tennis racket so I could adjust some more things. If only I could post those photos without embarrassing him! Anyway, we found a way around the string shadows by moving the racket off center. If positioned just so, it gave the illusion of being centered while casting no shadows.

Since I had to mimic the position of Kirsten in the original photo, I needed some more help. This proved to be challenging, but my dad has had me model for his paintings and illustrations since I was a kid, so we were old pros at this game! I figured I could stretch the rules of this “self-portrait” since it had to be as accurate as possible. Plus, I needed help eliminating those darn string shadows!

He coached me well and I got a few winners, but since they all look pretty much the same (no extra goofy faces this time, sorry!), I will only show one as the final pick. The one that most looked like Kirsten Dunst in that photo, happened to be one with the string shadows. I decided to just retouch them out, since there were some other unusual shadows I wanted to eliminate as well. You can call it cheating, but I figure the original photo was super edited too! Besides I make the rules for my photo projects, so why not? Dad pressed the shutter and helped me pose, so I was already cheating anyway. 🙂 I also decided to lower the resolution on my own photo to match the original screenshot that I snagged online.

Anyway, here is the final result alongside the original:

pinimage

Now, if I could only get Paul Bettany to pose with me…

Don’t forget to suggest your idea for next month!!!