Wednesday, 3 July 2013

Uncanny resemblance

My attempts to draw portraits of life-drawing models always seem to produce uncanny likenesses, in the sense of the Uncanny Valley.  To quote Wikipedia: "The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not perfectly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers."  These are drawn with charcoal pastels on mylar, which lets me erase and move lines.  Changing a feature by a millimeter (at nearly life-size) can completely change the face - but never quite seems to make it look right.  The top one is so scary that I had to banish it to the garage.  When it was in the house, we'd catch a glimpse of it at night and terrify ourselves.  Oh well, I guess I have lots of time to practice still before I get to the 10,000 hours that make an expert.  In the meantime, the pictures are useful for scaring away burglars.





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