Mario Diaz portrait
Added 2017-09-19 23:33:11 +0000 UTCA commission I got off of that Michael Hoffman portrait I posted last week. Mario is a club promoter, actor, and singer in a band called "dirty sanchez". We've only met a few times, but he seems as genuinely nice as one can be.
I do feel like I cheated with this one. I tried going through his instagram for a good picture to use, but being an active club promoter this proved difficult. I spent a while scrolling through the deluge nighttime cell phone pics of go go dancers and drag queens and hadn't gone back even a year, and still no usable reference.
So I googled him and found a pic shot professionally to go along with an article on Mario. Why is that like cheating? Using a portrait to do a portrait from means a lot of things like composition and lighting has been worked out for you. But ultimately I realized that these things worked against me. The pose and composition are boring and not as dynamic as I like. And the lighting washes out his skin, rather than turning the form. The photographer uses his facial hair to define his face, rather than lighting.
Hopefully these are lessons I will remember when choosing next time 😜
