Melodies in a low key: A first foray into self portraiture

Having mostly taken photos of either inanimate objects, or my cats (potentially also in the previous category) in the past I decided to take inspiration from a self portrait of Lord Lichfield that I saw at Shugborough and have a go at creating my own low key images.
The following problems were immediatly brought to my attention.
1: My flat was a mess and the abundance of white walls for my backdrop just weren't suitable. This was fortunately easily solved as I just cleared some space in front of my purple floor length curtains and shot the photos at night in black and white. Therefore creating what appears to be a black background.
2: How to put myself in focus when I'm setting up from behind the camera. this was also easy to solve as I just used my 40L dry bag as a suitable stand in to set the focus, this was then removed in my 12 second dash to get into possition.
3:Lighting. Initially I wanted to use a portable lantern, but quickly became aware that the light produced was not strong enough to create the shadows required. Using a flash produced a bright enough light but this was very unflattering and didn't produce the shadow effect sought after. Finally I found another lamp and rigged it up over the side of my bed so the light was shining mostly from one direction, but also slightly above and this produced the desired effect. All this faffing has made me realise I need to look up some decent lamps for my new"studio"

Eventually though i managed to get a couple of photos I'm honestly quite pleased with, they also required little to no post photo modification. (Mostly just to remove the odd slipper or book that had crept into view and to change the photo to a 1:1 ratio.