At my school, if you walk down the fine arts hallway, you might hear flutes and trumpets and saxophones coming from the band room. You might hear voices coming from the choir room. You might hear lines being rehearsed in the drama room or auditorium. You might smell paint or sawdust from the tech theatre department. But you'll definitely see the line of portraits hanging on the cinder block walls.
About the first half of the drawings are pencil and charcoal self portraits of the students, splattered with colorful paint. The second half are colored pencil sketches on colored paper.
To put it simply, the colored pencil drawings are incredible. They're fantastically realistic, and the colors are bright and unexpected, yet somehow exactly the right shade to create the image you expect to see.
Don't get me wrong, the self portraits are wonderful too, and there is obviously a lot of talent, focus, and hard work that went into creating them. But as a whole, the self portraits are not as realistic as the colored pencil drawings. Upon closer inspection, some of them appear a bit distorted, sort of like looking in a warped carnival mirror.
If you take the time to think about the drawings as you walk down the hallway, you might start to wonder why the drawings the students did of other people look so realistic, and why oftentimes the drawings they did of themselves are a bit out of proportion. And I think it goes back to another one of the lies society tells us.
The self portraits are distorted because that is how we, as people, tend to see ourselves.
We do not see ourselves as we truly are. We cannot see ourselves accurately. We have spent too much time criticizing our own appearances based on a set of "standards" that the media gives us. We have started to believe things about ourselves that just aren't true.
But with other people, we don't seem to do this. I think, a lot of times, we don't hold pick apart other people's appearances like we do our own. So often, we know not to be mean to others, but we never think about not being mean to ourselves.What you may see in yourself isn't necessarily what others see.
And I think that's worth remembering, next time you feel self conscious. Our internalized self portrait is not what others are really seeing.
About the first half of the drawings are pencil and charcoal self portraits of the students, splattered with colorful paint. The second half are colored pencil sketches on colored paper.
To put it simply, the colored pencil drawings are incredible. They're fantastically realistic, and the colors are bright and unexpected, yet somehow exactly the right shade to create the image you expect to see.
Don't get me wrong, the self portraits are wonderful too, and there is obviously a lot of talent, focus, and hard work that went into creating them. But as a whole, the self portraits are not as realistic as the colored pencil drawings. Upon closer inspection, some of them appear a bit distorted, sort of like looking in a warped carnival mirror.
If you take the time to think about the drawings as you walk down the hallway, you might start to wonder why the drawings the students did of other people look so realistic, and why oftentimes the drawings they did of themselves are a bit out of proportion. And I think it goes back to another one of the lies society tells us.
The self portraits are distorted because that is how we, as people, tend to see ourselves.
We do not see ourselves as we truly are. We cannot see ourselves accurately. We have spent too much time criticizing our own appearances based on a set of "standards" that the media gives us. We have started to believe things about ourselves that just aren't true.
But with other people, we don't seem to do this. I think, a lot of times, we don't hold pick apart other people's appearances like we do our own. So often, we know not to be mean to others, but we never think about not being mean to ourselves.What you may see in yourself isn't necessarily what others see.
And I think that's worth remembering, next time you feel self conscious. Our internalized self portrait is not what others are really seeing.
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