The Face Has Only Six Marks

The Face Has Only Six Marks

What this makes

Hand it a photograph of somebody and it comes back as a small handmade collectible figure of them — you name the few features that have to survive, because a toy face has room for about six. Two fields.

You are given ONE photograph of ONE person. Return ONE image: a small handmade collectible figure of that person, photographed plainly. Follow every line. Replace only the FIELDS block; everything after it is fixed.

First — do you have the photograph and the fields?

Say what this makes before you ask anything, in one or two sentences of their own words. Someone who has just pasted this has no idea what they are being asked for, and questions arriving cold are questions answered badly.

If no photograph is attached, stop and ask for one. The figure is of a particular person, so there has to be a picture of them.

If either field below still has braces around it, stop and ask. Put both questions in one short message, and show the example under each one so they can see the shape of a useful answer. Wait for the replies, then work. Never fill a brace yourself.

Ask in whatever language they are writing to you in. Translate the questions and the examples; do not make someone read English to tell you what they want.

If the photograph is attached and both fields are filled in, ignore this and carry on.

Fields — replace these two lines only

• The features that make them recognisable, most important first: {three to six features, in order}
• What the figure is made of: {a material, and how the features are made in it}

The law everything else follows from

Everything about how the subject is drawn may change. Nothing about what is in it may.

The person becomes an object: different proportions, different material, no photographic likeness at all. What may not change is who it is. A figure that could be anybody has failed even if it is beautiful, and that is the ordinary outcome here, because averaging a face is what a model does when nothing tells it which parts matter.

The face has only six marks

A toy face is a few embroidered or painted marks on a small curved surface. It cannot hold a likeness the way a photograph does, so recognition has to be spent deliberately:

• Work down the field's list in order. The first feature gets the clearest mark, the second the next, and so on. If the list runs longer than the face can hold, the ones at the end are dropped entirely rather than half-suggested.
• Every named feature is findable. Point at each item in the list and find it on the figure. A named feature that is not there is the failure this template exists to catch.
• Keep the asymmetries. One eyebrow higher, a crooked smile, a nose that bends — recognition rests on these more than on any regular feature, and they are the first thing a smoothing run removes.
• Hair is a shape, not strands. Its silhouette, its parting and its colour do most of the work; individual hairs do none.
• Glasses, facial hair and a strong garment colour count as marks and are worth spending one on, because they read at a glance.

Never average. If a feature is unusual in the photograph it stays unusual in the figure. A face that has been made pleasant is a face that has been made anonymous.

The figure

• Small, handmade, and clearly an object: a slightly oversized head on a smaller body, standing, facing the camera.
• Made of the material the second field names, and honest about it — visible stitching, wood grain, moulding seams, whatever that material actually shows.
• Clothing simplified to its colour blocks, with only the details the field named.
• Hands and feet simple. No fingers unless the material would have them.

The photograph of it

• One figure, standing on a plain seamless in a neutral colour that is not the figure's own.
• Soft even studio light, a soft contact shadow, sharp focus.
• Nothing else in frame: no props, no packaging, no hand holding it, no scene, no second figure.

Never

• A brand, a logo, a franchise character, or the proportions of any named commercial toy line. This is a handmade figure, not a particular company's product.
• Text, numerals or a signature anywhere, in any script.
• A scene, a story, a prop the fields did not name, or a giant hand.
• A second version of the figure, or a packaging mock-up.
• Smoothing, symmetrising or beautifying the face.

What it should read as

A figure somebody made of a person they know — small, plain, obviously handmade, and recognisable across a room to anybody who knows them.