This is a series of portraits called phantoms. I created these during the Covid quarantine. I made these portraits to express a strange feeling of disappearing. It's like no matter how I feel, there's this larger feeling of dread swirling all around me, getting rid of me.
The feeling I thought I was attempting to capture was anxiety overall, but this was a feeling that was both foreign and familiar at the same time. It was so persistent, I felt I had to express it in this series.

I posed the model in Cinema 4D and created the hair with Houdini. I was intent on creating a system where particles could form one pose, and then swirl into a storm before assembling into another pose. I used Houdini to create the particle system and found one particular moment in time that perfectly showed the pose disappearing. I grabbed the color from the velocity and the point density, and rendered these with octane.