An Apology To My Nose

Yes, that's a picture of me. No, I don't know how I got it to be so flattering, (yes, even with the breakout and the circles under my eyes, this qualifies as flattering, because I can look at it without wincing) but I kind of want to bottle my success and sell it.

I've been trying to get back into portraiture lately, mostly to decompress from my archaeological illustration class. And although I was never very good, I at least used to be better than I've been this past week. The problem most people have is with being too self-referential, so that your picture of someone else ends up with your own facial features, because we're all most familiar with our own faces. So I kept drawing people with huge eyes and long noses and I couldn't make myself stop it no matter what I did, and I thought maybe if I drew myself I could relearn which features to be careful about, exorcise my problem, and move on.

So this afternoon I took a bunch of pictures of myself, without putting on makeup or fixing my hair or anything, because I am way too lazy for that, and I was trying to avoid looking in the mirror too much beforehand, because when I do that I start to make "mirror face" and my pictures come out looking nothing like me (this one kind of doesn't either, but that's mostly because I have no expression at all.)

I would now like to apologize to my nose, and to all the people I have ever subjected to whining about my nose. Because, as you can clearly see, my nose is quite acceptably in proportion with my eyes and the entire upper two-thirds of my face. It is, in fact, my mouth that is causing all the problems here. It's like someone hit the lower third of my face with a shrink ray.

So, I'm sorry, Nose. And Mouth, you are now the one on my shitlist.