At some point last year I started to draw the author of each book I finished reading. A reason to draw more faces and a record of my reading habits. Might be interesting to see the variety, or not, of my habits. Usually I have no idea what the authors look like, searching for their image can change my perceptions in the same way as finally meeting someone only previously encountered on the phone. You don't look like the face your voice painted in my head, I often think.
No hiding of any garbage I read, similarly no edits or re-drawing and no discarding. These are quick doodles. Surnames removed when posting on Instagram, the idea not to be cartoon, caricature or realistic portraits of great likeness. Just faces*. Some are simply bad drawings; hopefully the better examples will hide the weaker ones rather than the converse. Part of the process, for me, is to see what works about the faces I draw and why.
The first 16 are above. Quite a few big hitters there, (Orwell, Nabokov and Greene). Looks like I stick to what I know the older I get. Either a worrying sign of growing conservatism or an admirable display of ever more discerning taste.
I don't expect anyone else to be that interested in what I've read, but I would be interested if other people did the same thing (illustrator or not). It could be like a survey done in a world where doodling book worms are forced to work in the National Statistics office, and we can extrapolate data like 'ooh, there's someone else who has read that book' and 'Kenneth Grahame is surprisingly tricky to draw'. It probably needs a hashtag, but that's basically admin so I'll leave that until the unlikely event of someone joining me with this idea.
*I've left in the book titles, so the curious can find out who they are, as well as often giving the drawings an accidentally enigmatic title.
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