Self Portrait from Mixed Media Class

I am taking John Hood's Mixed Media class at Allan Hancock College and it has been wonderful!  It is making me use a part of my brain that apparently has been dormant for quite some time.  This would be the part that has to actually think.  I usually work very intuitively and just go for it but he requires we use a sketch book to put down our ideas and do thumbnails of what we might want to do for the project.  This is a totally different way of working for me and it is challenging - which is a good thing.  For this project we were required to do a self portrait which is representational of ourselves.  After a lot of writing in the sketchbook, making thumbnails and actually thinking I decided that the two parts of me that are things that I do almost on a daily basis is cooking and working with textiles - sewing, embroidery, stitching......So the self portrait is representational of these two personas.

The right side represents the cook in me.  The face is done with basmati white and brown rice and lentils.  The lip is a chili pepper - probably representing the fiery comments that tend to come out of my mouth.  The clothing part is a college of recipes which is washed with acrylic paint.  The background.t of it is a college of food taken from cooking magazines and seed catalogs.

The left side represents the sewing side of me.  The face is done with sewing tissue paper and Portrait oil pastels.  There is fabric for the clothing with pins and thread around the shoulder area and fiber around the face and shoulders.  The background is a college of sewing tissue paper and is bordered by the selvage from fabric.

It was a challenge but a good one.....but now I am ready to move onto something else.....