Picture Day

I’ve been creating self-portraits every year since 2015. I did my very first one just for fun thinking it’d be easy to be my own model and that it’d be a good way to practice portraiture as a beginner, but painting an honest depiction of myself in a way began my journey to self-acceptance and growing/learning from pain.

I continued doing this "tradition" not only as a way of keeping track of my artistic progress, but also to look back on each stage of my life and see how much I change both physically and mentally. As cliché as it sounds, I made my best work when I was going through things. I painted every time I had my heart broken by the same person, when I became severely depressed and felt like I had nothing going for me, and even I was stressed about the littlest things. Doing these portraits turned from being a project to develop my skills to being a way for me to release my worst thoughts and experiences.

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Submitted by Justine Diaz.