TheChairman: Created page with "==Article Transcript== Eyes fascinate us. Not just us, as caricature artists, but us as human beings. They are the windows to the soul, the primary tool used to flirt, where y..."

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Created page with "==Article Transcript== Eyes fascinate us. Not just us, as caricature artists, but us as human beings. They are the windows to the soul, the primary tool used to flirt, where y..."

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==Article Transcript==
Eyes fascinate us. Not just us, as caricature
artists, but us as human beings. They are the
windows to the soul, the primary tool used to
flirt, where you look to tell if someone is lying, the
connection point between our inner selves and the
outside world; in short, there is a long, long history
of people raising eyes to a very high status, far
above other facial features. And this overemphasis
is certainly seen in caricature — if this notion is imbedded
in our psychology as human beings, we as
craftspeople must examine this and either exploit it
or, sometimes, compensate for it. One “trick” I was
taught early in my career was to leave the pupils
and irises for last, so that the drawing wasn’t “looking back at you” as you worked on it. This,
I was told, helps you see the caricature as a
series of shapes rather than just looking at
those two finished eyes and (subconsiously or
consciously) slacking off as you draw the rest of
the face. Likewise, onlookers frequently cannot
see the resemblance of a blank-eyed caricature
until that magic moment when you fill in
the eyeballs. Then, kapow! Instant recognition.
People describe that step as “breathing life into
the picture.” Many spectators seem only able to
express their praise as “Look at the eyes! You
got his eyes just right — wow, it’s all in the eyes,
isn’t it?”

Well, is it? I could spend time talking about the
micro muscular movements around the eyes
that cue for certain emotions, or the lighting
aspects for rendering the wet surface of the eye — but I am no art instructor. Caricaturing in a
live setting is, to me, as much about psychology
and human interaction as it is about the
line work. So let’s look at some psychosocial
trivia about the eyes.

Plenty of people have believed there was
more to the eyes than … well, what meets
the eye. In the 19th century, a German
minister named Emanuel Felke pioneered
“iridology,” the notion that iris tissue corresponded
to systemic health. Speckles at the
six-o’clock position of the iris meant kidney
trouble, speckles at the nine-o’clock area
meant lung issues, and so on. American chiropractor
Bernard Jensen tried to popularize
the pseudoscience of iridology back in the
1950s, but there has never been any clinical
data to back up iridology’s claims. So, like
phrenology, physiognomy, and a bunch of
other fanciful health-related notions, iridology
has proven really no more useful than reading
your tea leaves when it comes to diagnosing
a health concern. Turning from health
and looking instead to personality traits,
we find a field that’s piled even higher and
even deeper. People with green eyes are
passionate, and enjoy nature, while those
with brown eyes are intelligent, reliable, and
create a warm home life. Blue-eyed people
are more spiritual and outgoing; they love
having many friends. Well, depending on
which online quiz you go to, feel free to mix
and match these very generic traits, as they
were in no way consistently applied from
site to site. And most of the world has brown
eyes — so do all of the people on one of
these brown-eyed continents have the exact
same personality profile? Doubtful.

Now to some real science: Eye color can
tell us about the genetic background of a
person, but only to a certain extent. While
the simplified genetics many of us were
taught in middle-school science claimed eye
color resulted from a simple dominant-recessive
gene interaction (leading some kids to
wonder if they were adopted), we now know
that it depends on at least 15 different genes.
Though parents’ eye color makes for certain
probabilities, for those with even a little variation
in their family tree, any color is possible.
For instance, two brown-eyed parents can
indeed have a blue-eyed child, no mailman
required. Blue eyes (and the other lighter
colors) resulted from a mutation on the OCA2
gene, which essentially “turns off” the production
of brown melanin pigment. Human
eyes do not contain blue or green pigments.
Rather, the non-brown colors are produced
structurally — resulting from the interaction
of light on the microscopic structure of the
stroma of the iris. Similarly, peacock feathers
also only contain brown pigments, but their
microscopic structure makes them appear
iridescent blue and green.

Genetic researchers have traced all blueeyed
people back to a single ancestor with
this mutation who lived near the Black Sea
around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Before
that time, all humans had brown eyes.
Some speculate that the trait spread quickly
because of sexual selection: blue eyes were
found attractive, and so, on average, blue
eyes = more action = more offspring = a
higher percentage of blue-eyed folks in the
population as time goes on. While it smacks
of racism or at the least cultural relativism to
state that any eye color is inherently “more
attractive” than another, it does stand to
reason that something new or rare can seem
more attractive simply due to novelty. In my
retail environment, dealing with customers
from all over the globe, I have noticed that
the people who have “blue-eye envy” are
more often from places where brown eyes
dominate, while the average brown-eyed
person from Ireland or Sweden is quite
happy with their dark eye color. And, though
anecdotes are not hard data, I must say I
have a dark-eyed African American friend
who told me his attractiveness quotient shot
through the roof when he moved to Utah,
where he stood out as exotic among the
mostly blond, blue-eyed population.

Now, back to the caricature chair. Iridology
and personality-test bunkum aside, I have
found that you can indeed gain some insight
about people based on their eyes — or,
specifically, how they answer the question
“What color are your eyes?” Indoors, at a
distance of a couple meters, it can be tricky
to tell. So I ask. Over the past 22 years, I
have asked thousands and thousands of
people what color their eyes are, and without
really meaning to, I have developed a bit of a
cold-reading routine. Many people reflexively
answer with “Oh they change, depending
on what I’m wearing or what kind of light
I’m in.” This tells me that very few people
have enough knowledge of light and color to
understand that that is universally true of all
eyes and, indeed, any thing of any color. Our
perception of color depends heavily on the
surrounding colors. Some people will embark
upon a long, meandering tale of how their
eyes are some never-before-cataloged color
and everyone they know remarks upon them
and they turn an eerie shade of turquoise
every full moon, or some such nonsense.
This tells me that the person in front of me
is sociable, maybe a bit self-involved, and
grasping for something, anything, that makes
them special. Some men, when asked what
color eyes they have, will look confused and
then turn to the woman next to them and
blankly ask, “Honey?” This tells me that they
have probably been married quite a while!
Some teenagers or young adults will get
drawn wearing obvious tinted contact lenses,
but they will try to play it off like it’s their real
color. This tells me they’ve got that conflicting
mixture of vanity, a self-conscious desire to
alter themselves, and a cocky naiveté that
makes them think they are fooling people far
older and wiser than they are.

Oddly enough, these traits are also what
make people want to get a caricature!
Someone might be getting drawn because
they want an image that will help them feel
unique, cool or fascinating (even if they aren’t
so much). Someone else might be getting
drawn simply because their wife made them
sit down. And youthful vanity coupled with
the desire to alter a few things about one’s
appearance is probably the number-one
motivator that gets folks into my chair!

But some people I ask about eye color —
no, I should say a great many of them — answer
with one word. A word that has come to
be a longtime irritant of mine. A word I would
strike from the lexicon if I had the power. It
shouldn’t irk me as much as it does; it’s just
one little two-syllable word, after all. But it
tells me NOTHING. That word, if you haven’t
guessed, is hazel. And it is not an answer, for
it provides no information and means many
different colors to many different people. At
least when it comes to things that aren’t eyes,
we realize it’s useless as a descriptor. No
one says they have a hazel pickup truck or a
hazel pair of shoes that matches their hazel
handbag. What would that even mean?

Shakespeare is said to have coined the
term in “Romeo and Juliet” (1592), where
he used it to mean reddish-brown eyes that
were the color of ripe hazelnuts. Since then,
however, it has come to mean a wide array of colors, from gray to light blue-green to nearly
dark brown. From what I have seen, driver’s
licenses and military IDs do not seem to follow
any particular rules about what qualifies, either.
So the answer “hazel” must always be followed
with “What KIND of hazel?” To this end, I have
made a handy chart that you can cut out and
laminate, should you wish to use it at your place
of business. May it serve you well.

So, is it “all in the eyes”? Surely not. But there
are a lot of interesting facets to our little ocular
orbs. Work long enough in this business and
you will eventually run into a subject who really
does have amazing eyes. Twice now I have
drawn subjects who had the extremely rare
red-violet eye color that results for some with
albinism. Heterochromia and chimerism produce
strikingly mismatched eyeballs, and I even
ran into a fellow who pulled out his old driver’s
license to show me how his eyes started out
dark brown and slowly faded to light greenblue
(no contacts, trust me I’m good at spotting
those). I did a little research and, sure enough,
such a thing is possible. The melanocytes in the
iris continually produce pigment, and while most
people who experience an eye color change
do so within the first year of life, sometimes the
pigment production can gradually drop off as a
result of puberty, pregnancy, illness, injury, or
as a side-effect of medication. So the next time
your customer starts talking about their eyes
(and people do LOVE talking about their eyes),
give them some interesting trivia and dispel
some myths. And please, I beg you, try to get
them to stop using the word “hazel.”

''Celestia Ward works as half of Two Heads Studios in Las Vegas, NV, and can be found airbrushing caricatures at Planet Hollywood on the fabulous Las Vegas Strip.''

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The Beholder of the Eye - Revision history

TheChairman: Created page with "==Article Transcript== Eyes fascinate us. Not just us, as caricature artists, but us as human beings. They are the windows to the soul, the primary tool used to flirt, where y..."