poTAYto poTAHto

You don't take her hand. You don't know if you ever will again.

For portraiture you have the unique challenge of capturing the distinctive features while flattering them. There’s a tension of “what makes the person look like themselves?” against what they WANT people to see.

Acknowledging and respecting that, reflecting a View of the Self instead of a simple photograph, has always been an ephemeral and noble challenge of portraiture. It’s a rare skill, and while I’m not claiming to be a brilliant practitioner, here’s how I go about it. You want the person to feel SEEN - on a level and in a way that only a portrait artist could.

If someone in a novel were to spend a paragraph studying the portrait, they ought to be able to say something plot-relevant, like “the artist had faithfully captured the FAMILY RESEMBLANCE in the notable features and the PLOT POINT in the shape of her eyes… but no photograph could have captured the wistful turn of the mouth. Across a hundred years of distance, her soul was clear, speaking to Protagonist as if she were merely in another room…”

That’s the skill of portraiture, really, and it’s rarer than the ability to do good lineart (which I can’t do either; note that I’m not claiming to be GOOD.)

The immediate outstanding features of the “fan” are

Dark, hooded, distinctive eyes - she’s probably proud of them

Challenging, knowing expression

Long dark hair is a feature she’s proud of; because it’s well-cultivated

A sweet beauty of youth, but I can see what she’ll look like when she’s older

Notes on her features:

Roman nose that’s unusually short for the bridge type. Doesn’t have the space to be “hooked” but has the shape.

Natural brow with natural arch - fuzzing in to a shapely tapered form

Rounded face but with an interesting composition of flat slabby cheekbones and a high flat forehead. I’d love to look at it from other angles but she could model for a LOT of time periods and a LOT of artistic traditions.

Cool olive skin - very tricky!!! Especially with that pink lip. Frankly beyond me to depict fairly tbh… but at least I tried

Dark pigmented undereye and eyelid, which I chose to handle in the sense of “flattering eye makeup”rather than true depiction of her colouring.

Full mouth with NO CUPID’S BOW - fullness in lower lip

I’d elide the faint double chin out of gracious recognition of the angle and acknowledgement of the fact that the sitter would PROBABLY prefer it not to be noticed. I ultimately alluded to it, but elided it.

Even without the double chin, her determined yet rounded chin is another charming and forceful contradiction that lends what we call “character” to the face

💯 keep the moles

Presumably a fan of Instagram anime art is familiar with conventions and is therefore hoping for a portrait with glow brushes and SHEEN and TEXTURE and anime petals and veils barfed all over it - so I did a final version with those things - presuming it would make the “customer” happy

Obviously you can see that I’m quite humbly and realistically not an ARTIST but I thought it was interesting to contrast what skills are valued in a party trick of portraiture (breaking down and flattering features, playing a delicate game of flattery/pleasure and clear-eyed recognisability) vs a much more skilled and stylish render that is based on replicating anime aesthetics and thus - despite being better which I acknowledge! - didn’t engage so much with the goals of portraiture. Returning to the goals of portraiture - likeness, gesture, expression, picking out features, affection for the subject - is so,so good for the soul. For one thing, it reminds you of your ability to fall in love with faces…

I’d read the articles that young people have no privacy and have become so accustomed to it that they enact on themselves. Abstractly I knew this and had accepted it, but it’s only now that I’m seeing it become a major issues.

Obviously part of the problem is I need to become a trusted member of my new fandom. But fandom in general is becoming far more hostile to privacy than even just 5 years ago.

I’ve had to leave 3 servers that want to do age verification. And this is new. Not even 5 years ago when I started zines ppl just turning 18-20 were far more receptive to the ideas espoused by us older folks about not being surveilled. But now it almost feels like they *want* to be surveilled.

They’ve become so used to it from tiktok and their government that they crave it. I’d write a dystopia about it but unfortunately what even is there to say that hasn’t already been said?

If you’re 18-22 now and you’re reading this and willing to listen without immediately calling me suspicious: this is not normal. Age verification will not keep you safe and will not keep minors safe either. It will only lead to the normalization of further surveillance and erosion of your privacy.

I know it can be an unwieldy text especially if you’re not used to reading academic sources, but go read The Panopticon. Watch V for Vendetta or read the comic, read 1984. Watch The Lives of Others and understand the ways this modern era is not so different from the Stasi in the film.

Please.

For a character to be canonically bi you have to make sure and establish that they're attracted to multiple genders. Not all mediums allow you to get inside every character's head or show what they're thinking. Flirting can be read ambiguously, and god forbid they flirt with a character who's not into them and be read as pushy or predatory. So it can be super handy to just mention an ex or two! But you better not mention too many exes because that would make them a slutty bisexual which is (checks notes) bad, and you definitely better be careful about making them poly, because that might make them, uh... greedy. Oh, and those exes? They better be perfectly amiable breakups with no conflict or drama, because it's bad to represent queer people in toxic or abusive relationships (especially queer women! very bad), and you definitely can't have them have lost a partner if the partner was queer because that's "bury your gays..." You should probably also eliminate all trauma from their backstory, just to be safe. You should probably also make sure they're not involved in crime, deception, or anything of the sort, because that would make them "deviant" and a stereotype.

Happy Black Fae Day!

I did this as part of a collaboration post with many other wonderful black creatives over on IG. My theme was Warrior Fairy.

Creative Direction and editing by me

I still have the baby blanket I made your son, it's embroidered with his name on the front, but it never made it to the mail, he must be nearly ten years old now, I remember when you mentored me about that one life skill, thanks for letting me talk to you when you were busy, do you remember when I was telling you about my family, what about the time you and I voice called over dinner, or when I told you to try rambutans and jujubes, I still have the pencil holder you sent me seven years ago, but of course I ate the chocolate, the last time we talked you didn't seem so good, you were worried about your health, I haven't been back there in years, I hope you're well -