#sam2018

@snapeloveposts - Snape Appreciation Month 2018, Week #1

Snapes’s features or Snape’s Patronus? What a question! Interesting though his Patronus is, that isn’t the reason why I still draw Snape, now some 13 years after my first Snape picture. It’s his looks that keep fascinating me. Shallow? I don’t think so.

I am a self-taught artist (that’s as in ‘person who draws’, I make no artistic claims for myself whatsoever XD) and, like many others, I initially worked very hard to be able to draw beautiful faces. The handbooks I used featured beautiful people or told me how to draw superheroes. When I became fascinated with the character of Snape in the Potter books, I discovered that I had to learn how to draw a totally different kind of face - gaunt, large-nosed, sinister-looking. It was a bit of a struggle for me, initially. I usen’t to use any black. That, too, I had to learn for Snape.

I didn’t initially take to Snape, because he looks like a cliché villain and seemed to behave like one, too. In the comics I grew up with, characters with Snape’s looks were always - but, really, EVERY TIME - irredeemable villains. (Make of that what you will. As a little girl I wanted to be a princess, and worried that this was impossible because I have dark hair, and pretty princesses in the comics I read were always blond.) Even as a child, this bothered me a lot. I couldn’t understand why the villains all looked alike, and why a character’s looks made their actions so predictable. (Needless to say, the main villain in my comic is blond and good-looking.) So Snape initially appeared to be yet another tired cliché: black-robed, dark-haired, ugly = nasty, mean and villainous. Boo. Uninteresting.

Only - well, as I read on, I discovered that Snape wasn’t a villain at all. He was decidedly not nice, but he was no villain. He was brave, and smart, and self-sacrificing, and pretty heroic. He had done some horrible things in the past, but you could see how those had come about, and how he had not been favoured by circumstances. Snape had worked hard, and ultimately dedicated his life, to make up for what he had done wrong.

But he still looked like a cliché villain. Deliberately. I mean, just imagine him getting a haircut and dressing in blue. He’d make a totally different impression. But he doesn’t even try. He *enjoys* looking like a villain. Don’t you just love that about him? I know I do.

Snape’s ‘ugliness’ - which I put between inverted commas because I think it is quite glorious in itself, it’s such a cliché that it becomes art - and his style are essential to his character. It’s important to how he sees himself and to how other people see him. It is both incredibly honest (”I am a nasty, sarcastic bastard”, “I love Dark Arts”) and incredibly deceptive (”I am evil”, “I care more about power than about people”).

I like to top up Snape’s canon features (gaunt; dark, greasy hair; dark eyes, large hooknose; thin mouth; bad teeth) with some more Evil Wizard (tm) traits. I’ll give him a long, sharp chin with a cleft in it, and, my favourite thing of all, arched eyebrows with little tufts of Evil (tm). I also give him sideburns, but that’s mostly because too many members of my family have called him “that ugly woman” when they saw my drawings :p (clearly, man in robes = woman *sigh*).

I discovered that because Snape isn’t supposed to look handsome, I can add little lines to his face that I’d normally take out because they aren’t flattering. Those little lines yield a lot of expression. Snape’s face is tremendous fun. I fell out of love with the Potter books after Deathly Hallows, a book I found horribly unsatisfying - but I never fell out of love with Snape’s face, which I continued to draw.