More than 10 years ago, Blur released a Best Of.. record entitled, well, Blur: The Best Of, which had this as its front cover:
Recently, I’ve noticed these cartoons, similar to the style in the above record cover, cropping up on Twitter made using an app named iMadeFace, developed by a cloud software developer based in Beijing. At the time of writing, this app is currently at the top of the App Store charts worldwide simply because of its addictive nature. I initially thought the app uses a portrait photo and converts it into a cartoon, but I was wrong as you have to choose the components of a face from shapes of the face and its part, their colour and any accessory you’d like (available as add ons in the form of masks or funny hats). I was somewhat discouraged at first when I downloaded it as there were many bad user reviews. My fears were nevertheless unfounded as it was piss easy to use. The only difficulty is whether or not you have the ability to construct a face that is recognisable by others (yes, with the eye of faith added by blurring the vision and spending 10 minutes looking at it can defo make you say “Hey, that is me”).
I started by doing one of myself and after getting approving nods by other (non-biased) people, I considered my face done and it was time to move on to imadeface my friends and family. Here are a few I made recently:
I have to say that there are some easy faces, and there are the difficult ones, even when you attempt to do a caricature as opposed to getting the face spot on, as you’d wish they had more varieties of grins with teeth or smaller/squarer face shapes. Perhaps a later update where one can fine tune the anatomic position of the face parts could be of some help, especially if you wanna nail it. There are a few good ones of famous people and you can Google imadeface and check it out.
As I have a few more friends to ‘draw’ (some of which are actual requests), I can see myself using this for a while. That’ll be 5 stars or 10 out 10 from me, then.
