I love paying attention to features on people's faces - but I don't know how to convey this appreciation without sounding like a weirdo. (So I must blog it)
For as long as I have done observational sketching I have been honing my ability to pick up what makes someone's face uniquely theirs. I pay attention to how their features are shaped, their relation to each other, any distinctive marks, etc; all this analysis is distilled into a cartoon caricature, a summary of their individuality. Because my style is so stripped down (or elegant, as many readers have told me), quirks - any twist from beauty standards or the average look - are highly-sought because they represent a new shape, a challenge... an opportunity to turn this cartoon into a character with life and humanity.
This ability bleeds into my everyday life. I observe people's faces even when I am not drawing - this is partly to build the visual library in my head to mine for future character designs, but it's also something that I truly love doing. Like meditation, it grounds me to a reality away from the airbrushed world of celebrity and media. In movies and photographs, Photoshop reigns supreme, and if not PS, then surgery and holy grails.
I have a morbid fascination with the way people strive to erase quirkiness to match a beauty standard. I read about face filters come to life, legs elongated by adding extensions to broken femurs, and teeth being filed into nubs to be covered by facades that wear down. One of my favourite sub-reddits is r/instagramreality - which is populated by gawkers and skeptics who are flabbergasted at this chase for homogeneity that is artificially constructed (not just man-made, but by algorithms!). Finally, as of late, I have become curious over the phenomenon of people intentionally trapping themselves in a microtrend pyramid-shaped ouroboros - with their way of life being defined by being told what to buy/wear/do and then telling other people what to buy/wear/do.
To be beautiful is to not stand out, it seems. Which is a shame.
Everyone is sexy but nobody is horny.
I don't have a so-called beautiful* face - by Western or Eastern standards. Mine is the type of face Chinese girls would filter extensively - flat profile, flat fleshy stubby nose, poor (double) chin, monolid eyes.
*doesn't mean other adjectives don't apply; I like "intimidating", "frightening", "divine", "demonic", "luminous"
And there are other bits too, like my mostly-perfect teeth except for the one diagonal lateral interior, long torso, hip dips, very bottom heavy and fleshy/big-boned pear shape figure, and cankles.
Details that would expel me from a modelling agency or the harsher world of Tiktok reels. And yet...
I remember this quote from Tumblr that goes like - your face represents all of the people who still found sex and beauty and love in those features. Like - you only have your face and body because your ancestors fell in love at one time, then before and before etc. And someday, someone may find you interesting too.
As much as it dreads me to be almost a carbon copy of my dad, I still have my grandmother's face. I am her carbon copy. She carried that flat fleshy nose which is the crown jewel of my genetic line - something my dad, my aunts and uncle and half-brothers and myself all inherit.
(If I ever become mother to a child I need a partner with an equally dominant nose (different shape), otherwise that kid will not have options)
Apparently this face was good enough to have lasted several thousand years, so with any luck, it will continue to be passed on. In the meantime...
Objectively I don’t think he’s handsome. Good-looking, pleasant, easy-on-the-eyes, yes, but he’s an average specimen of a species of white male. Brown hair, oval face, slim, well-proportioned, dark kind eyes. A friendly brown-coloured poodle. A schnoodle. A goldendoodle.
Objectively I do not think he is Handsome or Beautiful - not in the same way I perceive a Cary Grant, a Toshiro Mizune, a David Gandy, a Dev Patel, an Idris Elba, a matured Lee Pace, or even the one random guy I saw on the tram in 2023; with these men my eyes instantly fire up and I am reminded of artistic ideals of beauty that I learned in art theory. I stare at them like I am staring at a work of art that draws me in. My brain is compelled to study them and their appealing character design. It’s almost an intellectual, academic hold over me. Like as if I had been studying birds all my life and then I spotted a rare species in person that I only knew through books. The rare bird is beautiful to me, objectively, because it is. And that it too represents an abstract concept: an instinctual longing to see and be with the subject, realised by chance
No, he is not handsome in that way. The only reason why I might say, in the end, that he is handsome (subjectively), is because I have seen his face for so long - 23 years. I have come to be familiar with the details for them to be obvious in my eyes, that I can catalogue them consciously in my mind and tell you in specific their qualities. My fondness for a person’s physicality (platonic, romantic or sexual) grows from maturing familiarity. Over time I love you more
"You have a face an artist would love to draw."
To me this is a compliment. Only because I AM the artist who - if social awkwardness and propriety hadn't nerfed me - would be dishing out this compliment to my fellow random passengers in public transport. I LOVE your face; you are so striking that it inspires me to draw you - like a master study; you are so distinctive and so individual that I want to capture your life's force, which continues to glow even in the boiled-down cartoon lines made by another person's hand; you are so refreshing for not being a conventional beauty, which can be fun to study but gets stale over time, like too perfect white bread.
My grand personal theory about beauty is that people need to look a bit quirky. I will not define what quirky means, since it always changes with whoever is holding the frame of reference - only to say that there must be something a little organically odd, primitive, human, bumpy that breaks the illusion of total uncanny perfection. It's like a round rock with a nice bump on its side. Or wood furniture with some patina. Comparing human to objects is bad, but there is only metaphor unless we want to put someone on the spot. A little unexpectedness, to show the personal touch.
It's a theory I hold in my character designs. A character can be pretty, but they got to have something quirky to ground them. The most recent character to go through this stage is Hephaestion. I might even count Alexander (I never designed him to look hot, unlike Hephaestion (according to my ideal, which is that list of handsome men listed above), though Alex seems to be growing into his features; he's in the Dean Lewis / Jeremy Allen White camp of faces). Anyway, I like to balance a face or body with something odd... yet somehow still fits the general mapping.
My favourite type of response is when anyone tells me my character feels real, or unexpectedly attractive, because of that theory. It's a response I enjoy experiencing in my day-to-day and is one I want to provoke in others, to break them out of the usual rotation of all-too-filtered faces of digital media. And in comics, too. Maybe not filtered, but the cartoon lines being sparse makes it easily comfortable for an artist to impose absolute beauty on a character. It's actually harder to draw a character's face that's not just a simulcrum of an artist's thirst - to draw them as they are. That's why same face syndrome exists, etc.
I know it's a bit of an oxymoron when earlier I said someone's face can be the type an artist loves to draw because it's so unique, and then say an artist has to resist the impulse from themselves to draw beauty. But I think those are two sides of the same coin, of the desire to capture appeal. For me I love to look at people like Lee Pace and have a bit of what I like about him (and the unnamed guy in my random non-sequitor note; those who know... keep to yourselves!) in some of my handsomer characters, but my real love is in noticing and appreciating the beauty in every face around me.
And how lucky I am, to live in a world full of people to draw!
