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 big-boned – 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.:

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 grimace. Combined with the tilt of the head, a reluctant submission to the photographer’s whim. The chin blends in with the skin of the neck. The face is long and thin, a lumpy oval, and the skin is a washed-out brown.

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