I started off with this picture,
and ended up with this one.
When I started this project, I was told to find a celebrity that I wanted to paste my face onto. That was actually the biggest challenge I faced. I, apparently unlike most people, am perfectly fine with how I look. I don't think I'm attractive or even particularly feminine looking, but I know what I look like, and I like it. I ended up choosing Felicia Day because I look up to her as a writer and an actor, not necessarily only because of her physical appearance. Sometimes it feels like that's all anyone looks at. Today, we are surrounded by a barrage of countless images of beautiful people, but we can never attain that level of beauty. It's not real. The photos are Photoshopped and the people in them don't exist as they are pictured. But, for some reason, we expect ourselves to look like the people in magazines, on billboards, or in perfume ads.
My senior service project deals with body image and portrayal of women in the media, so I've done research on this type of thing before, so my perspective on ads and the media hasn't actually changed because of this project.
One thing I did learn, though, was how easy it was to retouch photos or change them drastically. I thought they had teams of professionals to do this, but I could do it pretty well myself. The transformation of the picture was a bit ridiculous. Makeup, blemish fixes, and general beautifying were done in a matter of minutes once I understood how to do them. The final picture looks nothing like the original one, and nothing like how I look now. It looks similar to what I looked like when I had long hair, though, so I suppose it has to look like me somehow. It almost creeps me out a little.
I'm not a professional, so my Photoshopped picture is definitely flawed. I could never get my face to sit exactly right on Felicia's facial structure. The jaw still doesn't look quite right and the proportions could use come work. I think the main problem with it, though, is that my face is completely crooked. I only realized this after staring at a picture of myself for a few hours. The original photo is definitely taken from straight on, but when I singled out the face, it looked like it was facing a bit to the side. I think I could work on making the face look more natural overall, too. That would take a very long time and a lot of different tools, but it's kind of the point of the project. Where it is right now, it kind of falls into the uncanny valley. You can't point out exactly what is wrong with it, but you know there's something not right about it.
I think I did well overall. Felicia's face is very... multicolored, and getting my uniform skin tone to match hers on all parts of her face was very challenging, but I succeeded in the end. I also think I retouched my face well without making it look unnatural itself. The makeup, blemish fixes, and brightness changes made the photo look much better than it did originally.
