JAMES NGUYEN: Hi, my name is James Nguyen, and I studied visual arts at Castle Hill High School.

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My body of work is titled 'Self Portraits', and it features drawings of myself with the concept of how insecurity can alter our perspective and the way we view ourselves, and it can ultimately cause a loss of identity. Insecurity was something that I wanted to incorporate into my drawings. It was something that I had suffered with a lot personally with personal appearance.

I've always enjoyed drawing. I thought it was just something I was best at doing. And during experimentation, I did experiment with stippling. So that would be using a felt tip pen.

It started off with me taking hundreds of pictures of myself in my room in low light, and from there it was just selecting ones that I thought would be interesting to draw. For the first 2 drawings, I edited them using my phone. So I would just distort them sideways and downwards.

But for the next 3, I would use a long exposure effect, and that would basically just blur my face. I would shake my head around. I would wave my hands in front of my face, and that just created a blurry effect which I wanted to use.

When it came to drawing, I used a specific pencil, which was a mixture of graphite and charcoal. And that just allowed me to achieve really dark values and just achieving shadows into my artwork.

During experimentation, I initially wanted to just use graphite, but in the end, it achieved a shiny and reflective finish, and that wasn't really what I was going for. And so just charcoal allowed me to get a smooth and matte finish.

When working on the portraits, I just finished one at a time, and from there, I'd move on to the next. I'd never work at multiple at a time because I just felt like I wanted to put all my effort into one, and once I was finished, I would move on to the next.

An artist that really inspired me was introduced to me by my art teacher. Her name was Juul Kraijer. And her work, it featured similar aspects to what I had done. It included really dark tones which surrounded a singular portrait subject, and that allowed me to incorporate aspects of her work into mine.

My art teacher was really supportive of my work. She was the one who introduced me to artists which influenced my own. In my visual arts area, I experimented with a lot of techniques and styles. So I practised stippling as well as charcoal blending, and in the end, it just evolved into what I had put into my own work.

Advice I'd give to a HSC student would be to utilise as much time, both in class and at home. Especially for me, and I know for other students as well, I work a lot better at home. I just feel like there's a lot less distractions there. But if I had utilised the time in class, it would just be less stressful on me because I'd have less work to do at home and just more time to put efforts into each artwork.

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