Find the right details:
physical description
She is a muscular woman, and tall, a head taller than Mr. Richter
and some fifteen years younger, making her ten years older than
any other mother in our neighbourhood. Her clothes are from
another place, as are Mr. Richter’s, but whereas he comes across
as dignified, she, in her laced-up boots and long, loud skirts, with
her hair either hanging to her waist or roped around her head,
could be a Spanish dancer. She has dark, heavy eyebrows and a
big complicated nose flaring down to nostrils shaped like
keyholes.
-- from The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy
The two friends were very different. The one who always steered
the way was an obese and dreamy Greek. In the summer he
would come out wearing a yellow or green polo shirt stuffed
sloppily into his trousers in front and hanging loose behind.
When it was colder he wore over this a shapeless gray sweater.
His face was round and oily, with half-closed eyelids and lips that
curved in a gentle, stupid smile. The other mute was tall. His eyes
had a quick, intelligent expression. He was always immaculate
and very soberly dressed.
-- from The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Dmitri Fyodorovich, a young man of twenty-eight, of medium
height and agreeable looks, appeared, however, much older than
his years. He was muscular and one could tell that he possessed
considerable physical strength; nonetheless something sickly, as it
were, showed in his face. His face was lean, his cheeks hollow,
their color tinged with a sort of unhealthy sallowness. His rather
large, dark, prominent eyes had an apparently firm and
determined, yet somehow vague, look. Even when he was excited
and talking irritably, his look, as it were, did not obey his inner
mood but expressed something else, sometimes not at all
corresponding to the present moment. “It’s hard to know what
he’s thinking about,” those who spoke with him would
occasionally say. Others, seeing something pensive and gloomy in
his eyes, would suddenly be struck by his unexpected laughter,
betraying gay and playful thoughts precisely at the moment when
he looked so gloomy.
-- from The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
She was an athletic-looking young woman who always had high
color in her cheeks; she had dark, glossy hair and what her
mother called a mannish way of walking (she swung her arms),
and her rump and hips were so slender and hard that, from
behind, she resembled a young boy. In Jenny’s opinion, her
breasts were too large; she thought the ostentation of her bust
made her look “cheap and easy.”
--from The World According to Garp by John Irving
Neddy Merrill sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a
glass of gin. He was a slender man – he seemed to have the
especial slenderness of youth – and while he was far from young
he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze
backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged
toward the smell of coffee in his dining room. He might have been
compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one,
and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag the impression
was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather.
-- from “The Swimmer” by John Cheever
He was about middle height with sandy hair, a stubby mustache, a
very red face and extremely cold blue eyes with faint white
wrinkles at the corners that grooved merrily when he smiled. He
smiled at her now and she looked away from his face at the way
his shoulders sloped in the loose tunic he wore with the four big
cartridges held in loops where the left breast pocket should have
been, at his big brown hands, his old slacks, his very dirty boots
and back to his red face again. She noticed where the baked red
of his face stopped in a white line that marked the circle left by his
Stetson hat that hung now from one of the pegs of the tent pole.
-- from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Ernest
Hemingway
He was gazing at his wife now, into her intricately flecked hazel
eyes, into those pure whites touched by a bloom of the faintest
milky blue. The lashes were thick and dark, like a child’s, and
there was something childlike too in the solemnity of her face at
rest. It was a lovely face, with a sculpted look that in a certain
light brought to mind an American Indian woman, a high-born
squaw. She had a strong jaw, and her smile was broad and artless,
right into the creases at the corners of her eyes. She was bigboned – certain matrons at the wedding knowingly remarked on
her generous hips… Her violinist’s hands were pale and powerful,
her long arms likewise; at her school sports days she had been
adept at throwing the javelin.
-- from On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
She was pale and compact, no sags or pouches, linen skin tight
across the bone. The hollows of her cheeks were powdered
darkly, as if with the pollen of a tiger lily. Her hair was cropped
short and dyed the fashionable bright auburn of a ladybug. Her
earrings were buttons of deepest orange, her leggings mahogany,
her sweater rust-colored, and her lips maroonish brown. She
looked like a highly controlled oxidation experiment.
-- from A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Under the kitchen skylight she saw that he wasn’t so young.
When she opened the door she had just been aware of a skinny
body, a face dark against the morning glare. The body, as she saw
it now, was certainly skinny, but more wasted than boyish,
affecting a genial slouch. His face was long and rubbery, with
prominent light blue eyes. A jokey look, but a persistence, as if he
generally got his way.
-- from “Free Radicals” by Alice Munro
Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed
sable, with hair plaited in a horseshoe which pointed up when she
felt lucky, down when she didn’t… She needed no bra – she was
independent, even of gravity – she wore a red halterneck which
stopped below her bust, underneath which she wore her belly
button (beautifully) and underneath that some very tight yellow
jeans. At the end of it all were some strappy heels of a light brown
suede, and she came striding down the stairs on them like some
kind of vision or, as it seemed to Archie as he turned to observe
her, like a reared-up thoroughbred.
--from White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Now you try:
e.g.:
e.g.:
The head is tilted away from the camera, to the right. The hair is shaved very close
to the skin, and the beginning of the hairline is barely visible from the this angle. A
single crease begins just above the left eyebrow, next to the left temple, and slowly
ascends until it ends abruptly above where the right eyebrow begins. The eyebrows
are thick but not long. Beneath them the eyes are two brief, bold black
brushstrokes. A thin strip of skin beneath each eyelid is dark. The nose hews close
to the face, it’s big but flat, and the nostrils are set wide apart. Dark stubble dots the
upper lip – it’s as thick and long as the hair on the head. The lips are pale purple,
pressed together. The corners of the mouth point gently down. The subject is
frowning. The cheeks and eyes, however, seem to smile. So: a good-natured