I was actually intending to do a series of self portraits, but luckily I decided not to, because upon my return to university it turned out that I had to do self portraits all the time. For this task the portrait didn't have to be representational, but somehow I find myself unable to do non representational work. 

Instead I decided to "deconstruct" my face - starting with a realistic feather painting, than gradually doing more paintings subtracting more elements and realism until I was left with virtually nothing.

I had two days, but I knew I would only be able to use one (as the next week I would be in convalescence because I had to get my wisdom teeth out.) Unfortunately..I work far too fast. I was finished all the paintings by midday.

My starting point. This one took me the longest, naturally - probably about 40 minutes.

I'm trying to put these in descending order from "most realistic" to "least realistic" but sometimes it can be a little muddy. I also intended to go from large feathers down to tiny ones, but that got a bit muddy too. However my first feather is significantly larger than my last.

I'm beginning to lose my facial features. The first portrait is 5cm by 5cm on a cockatoo wing feather measuring 24cm by 5cm. The last portrait is 3mm by 1cm on a chicken feather measuring 6cm by 2cm.

 That was all very well but I still had a lot of time left over. So I did these:

I'm not sure how I managed to look so 70s. It isn't just the colour scheme (this, the small orange/yellow feather earlier, and the other feathers below are all hand dyed cockatoo feathers.)

The teacher suggested I deliberately split a feather. I burned the other one.

Finally, a "complimentary", inspired by my classmate's typewriter.