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I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

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Within just minutes after being born, they say, babies can already recognize--and prefer to look at--the human face over any other image or pattern. It's burned into our psyches, I think. There's a phenomenon where even grown-up people think they see human faces in things like grilled cheese sandwiches or turtle bellies, or in the scorch marks on the surface of an electric iron. (Incidentally, if such an image is thought to be of a religious figure, this perception is known as a simulacrum. The more you know . . .) I, myself, once saw the image of [insert Name of Religious Figure here] under a viaduct near my house:
That's the viaduct. Now here's a close-up of the simulacrum:


Ha, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaa. I jest. But there's no question that we humans have an ability to group any set of random visual elements that vaguely resemble two eyes and a mouth together and perceive the grouping as a human face, a gestalt, if you like. So perhaps that's why full-frontal, face compositions crop up on book jackets from time to time. They quickly catch our eye. Here are a few I spotted recently:


Beyond the Mask by David Ward (Scholastic Canada, 2006), a YA fantasy. It takes less than a second to see the "face."


This one jumped out at me the other day. It's Betwixt by Tara

I have been working on creating my own desktop reference for characters, young, old, multiracial. Concentrating on facial expressions and features these are the first of my studies. The studies help me to keep consistency within a character from page to page in a picture book. Hopefully it will grow into a reference of my own style that I can go to when I am working on illustrations for stories. In addition to these I also have a backlog of photos of children and adults from those that I work with in Christian Education and the summer theater for children in our town.

According to the Hindu Mythology, when Lord Shiva is angry then his third eye (situated on his forehead) opens...then disaster occurs..!!!

"Eastern Beauty" Artwork. Click image to view larger preview.

Some artwork I created for a "Sumatra Indian Chai Tea" package. The client changed their mind and we are going in a new direction now but I still like how it came out.

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