Okay, so not the usual type of art I post on POTW. Its true. More on that in a minute, first let me tell you about my friend Bethany.
Holly and I first met Bethany O’Banion (or B. O. B. as I like to call her) back in 2013 when she joined us on the trip to Poland. Bethany has a personality as big as her smile, and a positive attitude that is absolutely infectious. What you might not realize though if you just hung out with her; she battles Crohn’s disease. Many days are spent in pain, which can be accompanied by a spirit of loneliness. I think one of the things I most appreciate about her though, is that she refuses to be defined by her circumstances. Even on the hard days, she celebrates God and all that He has done for her (speaking of which, our church made an awesome video about her, which you can watch here > Fellowship Stories: Bethany O’Banion).
Now, the picture. Totally unrelated to Bethany, I have been goofing around lately with turning pictures into drawings and making caricatures in Photoshop, when I stumbled on a video talking about making the 3D drawing effects, like what you see above (here’s a link to the instructional video, but I combined it with this guy’s drawing effect). I tried my hand at it a few times, but with me being bald, the pictures just weren’t as neat looking. Enter Bethany. Bethany had said something about wanting a good head shot of herself so that she could send it to some modeling agencies, and ultimately chase after a dream of hers. I set her up with some portrait photographer friends of mine, and Holly and I decided to tag along for the fun… and I of course brought my camera.
To setup the shot, I had her lay on a big white board with her hair flipped out. I initially had her try a few different things with her hand stuck out, similar to what is shown in the instructional video above. Then, out of no where, Bethany starts singing… as Bethany does sometimes… and that’s when I got the shot. When I saw the image, it looked to me like she was in pain (which is where I got the broken pencil idea from), and I thought the whole thing paired well with her story in general.
–Dan Thompson