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Last week I was discussing how I think the greatest roadblock to being an artist is our natural tendency to not really see what’s in front of us, and how much that figuratively bites us in the ass when we go trying to reproduce it. Even when we have all the tools available that might get around having unsteady hands, the conceptual roadblock is there. I brought up the example of video game character customization: here you are with a model that a professional artist has already done the work creating, often with a selection of pre-made features to “plug in” on the face, and as time goes on they’re getting more and more nuanced and featured until it feels like you should be able to accomplish a faithful recreation of anything. They don’t have a preset for an “African” face? No problem! You’re a black person yourself, or you know black people or can at least get plenty of picture references of black people… with all the morphs and sliders, this should be easy!
And then it’s not. And it’s worse when you’re trying to recreate someone in particular, and worst of all if you’re trying to recreate your own face and fall short. Does the poor craftsman proverbially blame their tools at that point?
Well, maybe. For instance Black Desert Online has a much lauded creation engine, and yet when Dawn and I tried it out back in the day it seemed to suffer from frustrating limitations despite the range of sliders available. I seem to remember, for example, that there was no provision for making a female character that looked older, or that if a certain class preset started with a Caucasian face vs. a more Asian face, it seemed obnoxiously difficult to morph one into the other.
Of course for me, part of the problem is it turned out I had stunningly vague ideas of what makes a European and Asian face look different from one another, and how both are different from the face of someone with African origin. And heck, this is well before even trying to, say, make a character with Korean features versus Vietnamese. Ask me to recreate “Wild” Will Nguyen in a game and that’s gonna be rough.
Having studied anatomy and life drawing, Dawn is of course far more aware of these matters, but what comes naturally for her (or more naturally due to her observational training) often ends up a train wreck for me. I clearly remember trying to make a black character for Dragon Age 2 and ending up with someone who looked more Pakistani. Again it might have been the tools provided but I gave up and just rolled with it at that point since at least I had achieved “definitely non-white” and had already spent several hours of not getting to the actual game.
But every so often a new game with customization comes around and I get curious again about what even a schmoe like me might be able to accomplish. I’ll check out sites like this, which start from the Golden Ratio and posit a theoretical “beauty mask” for humankind that can then be morphed to represent generic ideals of gender and ethnicity. The concept of beauty is an inherently problematic one, but proponents of “the mask” are careful to emphasize that no one race has any more claim than another to being an ideal, and that there are of course innumerable variations beyond that. But from an artistic/recreation standpoint it is immensely helpful for me to have some guidelines to consider when trying to select or morph together an Asian eye. In fact, even though you might think such a resource would promote caricatures and stereotypes, in practice it seems to help me avoid it because caricatures and stereotypes are basically the shortcut symbols I’m trying to avoid anyhow. No black person really looks like those awful thick-lipped caricatures of certain 1930s comic strips, but then again neither do they just look like me with a dark skin tone. And heck, here I am with a half Mexican wife and still I have trouble trying to recreate Rosa or even someone generically Latinx. Oh how she judges me.
But I’ll keep at it, because it feels like good training and maybe also a good way to recognize just how much variation and beauty there is in all faces of humanity.