These are two of my professors. As to who they are, you go and guess. I don't know if it's just me or drawing them while they're discussing really makes me retain the lesson more effectively. Anyhow, I have come to believe it does.

I enjoy drawing my professors. Don't get me wrong, these aren't caricatures or mockeries of them. These are simple drawings. "Why do I draw them?", you may ask. Let me tell you.

In drawing them I get to see something other students don't seem to notice. Their subtle quirks perhaps, or the way the lines on their forehead seem to appear and reappear, or the gentle manner they press their lips together in mid-sentence, or the gradual gliding of their glasses down their nose, or the sudden (if not startling) movement their ears make, or the crease on the side of their mouths, or the scar on their cheeks, or their prominent dimple, or their constellation of moles, or their chiseled nose,or their divided chin, or their shy lashes, or their receding hairline, or their arching brows.

DETAILS.

When I look at them---not just stare at them---, I see the details... and then I wonder what makes them so. Their story, surely they have one... And as I put those details into paper, I feel as though their stories are passing through my pencil. Every line, every shade, and every stroke I render, makes me feel like I am telling their stories... although not really.

And when I am done, I see them differently. They become paradoxically familiar yet unknown to me. As though I've seen more of them yet they became more enigmatic. It's like seeing one phase of a cube and knowing the existence of the rest yet remaining clueless as to what they are.

So every time my pencill kisses my paper for the last time, I'd stare down at the face I have come to draw and I say, "nice to meet you."