This was an English assignment; a drawing that was supposed to correspond with some quote in the book we are reading... Since the narrator is a painter, she describes one of her paintings in a lot of detail, so I decided to try and replicate her painting. (Cat's Eye, by Margaret Atwood.)

Here's the quote that was used:

“She’ll come in the door and she’ll see herself, tilted, framed, and dated, hanging on the wall. She will be unmistakable: the long line of jaw, the slightly crooked lip. She appears to be in a room, a room with walls of pastel green.

This is the only picture I ever did of Cordelia, Cordelia by herself. Half a Face, it’s called: an odd title, because Cordelia’s entire face is visible. But behind her, hanging on the wall, like emblems in the Renaissance, or those heads of animals, moose or bear, you used to find in northern bars is another face, covered with a white cloth. The effect is of a theatrical mask. Perhaps.

I had trouble with this picture. It was hard to fix Cordelia in one time, at one age. I wanted her about thirteen, looking out with that defiant, almost belligerent stare of hers. So?

But the eyes sabotaged me. They aren’t strong eyes; the look they give the face is tentative, hesitant, reproachful. Frightened. Cordelia is afraid of me, in this picture” (Atwood 285).