Why I Don't Draw

self-portrait, 13 October 1985

In 1985, I acquired a copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. This was my first attempt at drawing myself from looking in the mirror. Friends who saw the drawing laughed. "Your nose is not that long," they said, but even at this very moment, it doesn't look all that disproportionate to me.

That should seem stranger to me than it does, because I've just spent some time playing around with this in Paint Shop Pro. I layered a photo of myself over the drawing to see how the features lined up. My friends were right--the nose was laughably long. So I fooled around with it a little, using Paint Shop Pro to shorten it. In the throes of laughter over the length of the nose, nobody mentioned that my eyes are not that big either. And the rest of it was somewhat misaligned as well. One by one, I selected features, resized them a bit, and placed them in better alignment with the features in my photo.

In the two samples below, I used a mirror-image of the photo to see how it lined up with the drawing. The drawing, of course, is what I see in the mirror, while a photograph is what others see as they look at me, the opposite. By mirroring the photo, I was able to see how the right side of the drawing face lined up with the same side of my face in the photo, and likewise with the left.

Then I tried reconstructing using both sides of the face, a left and a right, to make a complete face.

Below is the drawing as it appears after the adjustments. I can see that it looks more proportionate than the original sketch, but I can't see that either drawing looks like me.

Out of curiosity, at some point I mirrored the drawing, to see whether it looked any more like the photo. I was stunned when I saw the mirrored version.

This face is totally lopsided! I don't think my actual face is this lopsided, although I know my right eye generally does not open as much as my left.

I think it's really weird that, even though I can see how lopsided the mirrored image is, neither the original image nor the modified image seems particularly lopsided to me.

Returning now to the first pair of images with photo overlays, both the mirrored right and the mirrored left seem to be shaped about right, so maybe I really am lopsided.

Huh... who knew!