As the clock ticks its way toward 9:00am, Robbi is at her desk, drawing away. She’s working on the slides that will accompany our presentation at the Essay Symposium next weekend in New York. The script of our “talk” is a back-and-forth dialogue between Robbi and me, a first-person narration of our ideas about the visual essay. Since we are the main characters in our own presentation, we appear frequently in the accompanying slides. Rather than draw caricatures of our faces (a thing Robbi hates), she is using photos of our heads and drawing bodies around them, much as she did in illustrating our book Unattractive and Inadequate.
Here’s a detail from that book:
Our presentation will consist of 60 or so slides, in which the two of us will be featured doing many different things, with many different facial expressions, head angles, etc. Rather than take a new picture every time she starts a new illustration, Robbi created a menu of heads from which she can pick and choose as she works.
You can imagine that the photo shoot was a ridiculous affair.
If you have always wanted a bookmark featuring many versions of Robbi’s head or mine, here’s your golden opportunity.
