The Beautiful People are by and large, silly looking and have major "facial flaws" that sometimes border on deformities. Yet ugly people can become fascinating and beautiful when you learn to draw them. Why is it that artists see things differently from non-artists? It's because most people don't actually look at what they're seeing. They recognize it by its symbol. What you think you know about what you're looking at influences what you see.
What your eyes see is everything that's coming in. Your opinion of it filters that to whether it's beautiful or not, and there are some things about artistic beauty that almost seem rooted in instinct. Others are conventions rooted in centuries of art history.
I suspect "good composition" is a quality related to human instinct, because little kids have it before they learn much at all about art. They lose it, then relearn it later as adult artists. Because composition has got some cross-cultural recognizability, I'd have to say that what human beings value in a picture's arrangement may have some deep basis in being human.
If you look at the shape of a human eye, it's not a pointed oval with a little circle in the middle like this: <o> -- but that is exactly what most people will draw. A symbolic eye. If it's female, people may add exaggerated long eyelashes. We still recognize the Eye of Horus as an eye with a tear running from it even though none of us are ancient Egyptians, some symbols are so powerful they show up throughout history.
But a real eye is unique to that person. The reason "the eyes are windows of the soul" is eye expression, which is all in the eyelids -- how far open, what each eyelid's shaped like, everything about the exact shape of that eye at that moment. The eyeball itself is wet and glossy, the skin around it matte and smooth or wrinkled and interesting. The exact shape of the little wrinkles on the eyelid gives some history of the person's past expressions.
So what you wind up with is a lot of nonverbal information about personality, not just the immediate expression but whether it's habitual. No wonder it's the window to the soul!
The only way I know of to look past language and symbol -- the idea of the eye as opposed to the reality of my granddaughter's eye today when she's five and in a silly playful mood -- is to learn to draw realistically. This won't hurt your ability to do abstract or loose artwork. On the contrary, once you can draw what you see accurately from life, it's easier to relax and not worry about getting the details right when you decide to draw something from imagination.
Art gets treated as a soft option in schools, it's not taken as an important subject. But learning to draw realistically sharpens observation and teaches intuitive awareness, makes people more creative and improves the ability to understand yourself and the world around you. Learning to draw well has many benefits beyond being able to sketch your friends at parties or make a living selling paintings.
One of the greatest for me was that after I did learn to draw people accurately, I could see everyone as beautiful. I'd look at a grumpy old man and start seeing how cool his craggy face was, how interesting the lines under his eyes were and the shadows of his eyebrows. I'd look at someone I didn't like and understand why I thought he was ugly... that it's his expression of belligerent stupidity rather than the shape of his nose or mouth.
Actors and actresses learn facial recognition that well too. Art isn't the only route to it. But if you can observe and draw what you see, then you will always be surrounded by beauty. Even your trash will have cool things in it that might become part of a still life, a dingy brick wall is full of colors and textures, a bug on a broken leaf becomes a meditation on nature.
Up till the point I could draw, I pretty much thought handsome actors and beautiful actresses were good looking, normal people weren't except if they were. When I started drawing them, I started noticing pug-nosed beautiful women, squinty little eyes on beautiful girls, big or crooked ears. Men I thought were handsome turned out to have busted cheekbones and distorted mouths. Yet the force of personality, their expressions and confidence make them look as if those features are the height of beauty -- and they really are beautiful.
Someone with absolutely dead-perfect features, perfect symmetry and everything well formed, may well look bland and only vaguely good looking rather than strikingly gorgeous. The beauty in a person's face is what he or she is saying with it -- and being able to draw portraits accurately reveals that beauty.
So if you learn to draw, you'll live in a world where no one's ugly and everything around you is full of beauty. It takes a long time to learn. A lot of different skills, both mental and physical, go into drawing well. It looks like it's some mysterious talent because once you've learned those observational and physical skills, you never forget them and using them becomes automatic.
The more you practice drawing one subject, the better and more accurate you can draw that subject. So if you want to raise your self esteem, start doing self portraits in your drawing practice. Do them regularly and concentrate on accuracy in the areas of light and shadow. Side lighting is more flattering to most people than direct overhead or frontal lighting, so put a lamp next to you while you're looking at the mirror.
Read good books on how to draw in general and how to draw people. Practice doodling and drawing, sketch other people too, but do a self portrait once a week just to see how your skills are coming along. You don't need to show these to anyone until you're proud of them.
But after a year or so, when you get to where your portraits are recognizable, you'll start to see the good things in your own face and realize you have as much inherent beauty as any other human being. You'll also make new friends and have many other social benefits from being able to draw, it's been a useful icebreaker ever since I learned.
Most of all, enjoy the process! It may take some time to learn but it's immensely valuable -- and your world will never be the same. It will fill with beauty.
