How I made myself into a Van Gogh painting

My first thought on seeing these painstaking photographic recreations of famous paintings was, "Why would anyone want to do that?" But my second thought was, "Right – give us a go, then." The rules on Jeff Hamada's Remake project stipulate that only classic works of art should be staged, and that no post-production effects are employed. Some of the interpretations are literal, some are loose, others have been updated or toyed with. My choice, Van Gogh's Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear , from 1889, was pretty straightforward, or so I thought: coat, hat, bandage, done. Van Gogh cuts a pitiful figure in the portrait, painted just after he cut off his left ear lobe . He was in and out of hospital, plagued by hallucinations and despair. He looks cold, too. I figured I could fake all that. Recreating a painting in a photograph, however, presents all kinds of challenges – of composition, of colour, of depth and perspective. I knew I didn't look much like Van Gogh – I'm not complaining, by the way – but in my efforts to reproduce the painting as faithfully as possible, I encountered a number of unexpected problems. For example: 1 It is an odd but surprisingly persistent tradition that men's coats button up on the right side and women's on the left. Van Gogh, of course, painted himself using a mirror, which is why his coat buttons up the wrong way. My coat was of no use. 2 He may have done a mirror-image portrait, but the background is the right way round. You can tell by the figures in the Japanese woodcut behind him, Geishas in a Landscape . Finding a decent copy of the print at short notice would be difficult – Van Gogh's print was nicked from the Courtauld in 1981. I tried printing one off the internet, but the result was too small. Besides, Van Gogh had messed with the composition for his painting, cutting out a seated figure to the right. In the end I drew my own with pastels – an approximation of Van Gogh's impressionistic rendering. It didn't take that long, because I didn't have to do the bit obscured by his head. 3 I had an easel of my own, but the top of it was nothing like Van Gogh's, so I fashioned a fake top out of scrap wood and lashed it to the easel with duct tape. The canvas I had lying around the house. 4 Van Gogh's painting has a sickly, yellow cast, which accounts for a lot of its pervasive melancholy. I tried to reproduce the effect by climbing out a window and draping a yellow duvet cover over the kitchen skylight, but this wasn't terribly successful. So, with my wife's coat, a borrowed hat and some bandages from the first-aid kit, I set about arranging the scene. The position of the door on the far right corresponded to an actual door in my house, but it wasn't a good match. An old Ikea shelving unit worked better. 5 The little tail of hat fur peeking out from behind the bandage is in fact an ear belonging to a small stuffed rabbit, which is stuck down my the back of my collar. The forlorn expression and the sallow complexion, I'm sorry to say, are the model's own.