365days

of henk

By Illustrator Henk Willems

August 18^th, 2024

Selfiness

In these extreme selfie-times, everyone always tries to capture the best possible and most idealistic shot of him/herself. Add a bucketful of effects, filters and graphics and it will make everybody look like you were just on the cover of the new Vogue-magazine. Everyone posts these selfies on all social media channels available and thus creates an image that doesn’t match the normal reality (everybody looks skinnier, healthier, less exhausted and extreme attractive). The concept behind the project is the ‘fakeness‘ of these social-media profile pictures. There‘s not many people out there that actually look like their profile pic in real life. I wanted people to see what it actually means to create an image of yourself that looks ‘different’. Of course, I went one step further and put myself in ‘weird, iconic, famous and even historical portraits. And I did this every day, during a whole year.

For Music for Life (Studio Brussel) I've sold limited art prints of these images. The money went to the Zeepreventorium in Ostend, who helps children recover from chronical diseases.

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the process

It only takes me about 10 to 15 minutes daily to make these portraits. Inspiration comes from everyday. Whether it’s something that I’ve just read in the news, or saw on television or even some song I just heard on the radio. All these incentives were enough to create a daily selfie. After a few minutes on Google images you’ll find the perfect canvas to work on. Now you just put your head in the same pose as the original image (maybe with a little twist) and you’ve got everything you need. And the rest is done in Adobe Photoshop through layers, masks and some other tricks. And this full process never took more than 15 minutes. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to get to 365 in one year.

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Themes

Whether it’s about a singer, an actor performing, a political or country leader, somebody that died that day or died a long time ago, some tv characters from long time ago, a new hype on the internet, a classical painting, somebody having a really bad hair day, a quircky family, a nobel-prize winner, a fashion model, an athlete, an old advert, a consumer packaging, a sculpted buste, a monument in the desert or just a beautiful face, everybody could be the perfect canvas to portray myself in.

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Thanks to…

I would like to thank all the photographers whose images were used as the canvas for my own 365-project. I credit you all. I hope they will remain taking these beautiful images or illustrations. And for me, the serie ended november, 12th 2016.