Characters that appear in movies adapted from books are rarely what readers had imagined.
Is there a more accurate way to see the characters we create in our imagination while we read books? Yes, there is.
Meet The Composites – an online project run by a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and digital artist Brian J. Davis.
He is using a commercially available police-style composite sketch software to create portraits of literary characters. You’ll see Lisbeth Salander, Dorian Gray, Lolita, Count Dracula, or Sherlock Holmes, among many others.
As you may have expected, the portraits are based on character descriptions found in books. On The Composites Tumblr Blog you’ll find each image accompanied by a relevant passage from a book.
But sometimes the descriptions are not enough to develop the complete picture. In this case, Brian J. Davis reaches for references and descriptions from book reviews and reader discussions.
45 of these literary portraits, this time in full color, are available in a book published by Davis in 2012. It’s called The Composites: Police Sketches of Literary Characters, and features characters from novels by Herman Melville, Charlotte Brontë, Victor Hugo, Bram Stoker, or Thomas Mann.
Brian Joseph Davis smashes character descriptions and reader interpretations together to create uncanny, compelling portraits of literature’s most infamous criminals, outsiders and anti-heroes.
Most of the images for The Composites project were created in 2012 and 2013, but the artist promises to come back in February 2016 with new portraits and a monthly podcast.
Which of these characters are exactly how you imagined them? To me, the best matches are Lisbeth Salander, Kurtz, and Dorian Gray.
Book characters in police sketches
Lisbeth Salander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Dolores “Lolita” Hayes, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
Colonel Cathcart, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey.
Julia, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell.
Count Dracula, Dracula by Bram Stoker.
Kurtz, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Annie Wilkes, Misery by Stephen King.
Dorian Gray, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
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