Studies for a self-portrait

I mentioned a while back that I don't have any nice pictures of me with Haley, and that someday I would paint one. The other day I finally sat down and decided to sketch out some ideas on a piece of scrap paper.

The first one I did (the blue figure in the lower left) came pretty close to what I was going for: a shadowy scribble conveying the essence without going into any detail.
The working title of this is Haley with Self-Portrait. I don't plan on putting anything much into the self-portrait part - for a while I considered just a few strokes of charcoal to represent me, but I've never worked with charcoal before, so I'll stick to acrylics.

The Haley figures are just thrown in for size and placement. I'll need to gather together a lot of Haley photos to do her justice. I'd like to do a more realistic rendering of her than I've ever done before, but I don't think my slapdash ham-fisted technique can really do her justice.

The second figure I did is the black one with blue hands in the lower right (I grabbed the wrong pen when I decided I'd made the arms too short). This figure is more realistically proportioned, but somehow seems to be in a more tentative pose.

The other figure sketches are just attempts at getting the basics of the design down, while the geometrical abstractions are an effort to get to what is the essential layout of the self-portrait.

This image contains a lie, by the way. I did not typically walk Haley while wearing the hat represented here, which is one of my tweed caps from Ireland. I usually wore a long-brimmed baseball cap to help me block out the glare of streetlights during our pre-sunrise waks. But I thought that would look a lot sillier in this picture, so the Irish hat is there instead.