for the term of his natural life

Off to wilderness to the east of the old penal colony of Port Arthur tomorrow. If I'm never heard from again, I may as well freak everyone out by including a mugshot-like portrait of myself at the top of this post.

My gen-ed finished on Friday, and the relative lack of drawing that I've done over the past year of so feels well and truly made up for. I was doing so much drawing that my mum thought that I'd gone mad. I had my curtains drawn over the past two weeks so that the sunlight wouldn't change the tone of any of the objects that I was drawing in my room. Every time she walked past my room, I'd be sitting in the dark, deeply concentrating upon something or other whilst making marks on a piece of paper.

That self-portrait was particularly interesting to do (does it looks like me?). The assignment required us to do a self-portrait in a manner similar those street artists that you see around. We had to pay particular attention to our facial proportions in an attempt to get a likeness, and in the process of doing that, I began to notice a lot of little things that I had failed to appreciate before. For instance, the left side of my jaw appears to be slightly larger than the right side of my jaw (it's the other way around in the drawing above because I was looking in a mirror when I did it), and my Adam's apple is slightly off-centre when viewed from directly in front.

Our drawing teacher had been going on about how facial symmetry determines how attractive someone is, about how we tend to judge people based on how attractive they are, and how the news readers on Channel 10 have very symmetrical faces whereas the news readers on the ABC have very unsymmetrical faces. I had my doubts that things were as clear cut as that, but it was something fun to think about. I found this study on facial symmetry after a quick search on the web, which made some of the things my drawing teacher was raving on about seem somewhat exaggerated (I'm a bit confused about the opening paragraph in that link though... evolutionary theory directly makes assumptions about facial symmetry?). Anyway, I decided to test things out on myself, and here's the result:




The more I analysed my face, the more malformed, unsymmetrical and psychologically damaged I became. The image on the bottom left hand corner is how I look to everyone else, the image on the top right is how I look in the mirror, and the other two images are how I'd look with a perfectly symmetrical face. But do I look better with perfect facial symmetry? Personally, I reckon the face on the bottom right looks a bit like a Cro-Magnon man, and the one on the top left is just a little too Michael Jackson for my liking.

As a comparison, I thought that I'd try the same trick on Natalie Portman:




Hmm... well she definitely doesn't do too much to disprove that facial symmetry hypothesis.

I showed the above results to my drawing teacher. She then proceeded to talk about how Natalie Portman has probably spent a fortune on getting her eyebrows identical, how symmetrical my facial features are, how some people shave their cheek bones during plastic surgery to obtain better facial symmetry, how cheap nose jobs only involve changing the nose cartilage, how expensive nose jobs involve filing down the bone at the base of the nose, and how she inherited an ugly big nose from her Dutch father. Listening to my drawing teacher's rantings probably made up for any emotional scarring that I may have sustained from realising that my skull shape does not display perfect symmetry.