Fictional characters sketched by police software (images)

Writer and artist Brian Joseph Davis takes law enforcement software designed to create images of suspects and brings it to bear on descriptions of characters in novels. The results make up his new Tumblr-based/crowd-sourced art project, "The Composites."

"I think the not-quite-3D rendering makes for an uncanny effect," Davis told Crave, "especially on literary characters, who don't exist--and even rendered like this, still don't quite exist."

In the crowd-sourcing aspect of the project, Davis solicits requests for characters/subjects from readers of the blog. What follows are some of the images, along with the descriptions Davis referred to while creating them.

Vaughn, "Crash," J.G. Ballard

"His exhausted face, with its scarred mouth... As his pock-marked jaws champed on a piece of gum I had the sudden feeling that he was hawking obscene pictures around the wards... But what marked him out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence... Heavy black hair... Broken and re-set nose bridge... His features looked as if they had been displaced laterally, reassembled after the crash from a collection of faded publicity photographs. The scars on his mouth and forehead, the self-cut hair and two missing upper canine gave him a neglected and hostile appearance... His hard mouth, with its scarred lips, was parted in a droll smile."

Aomame, "1Q84," Haruki Murakami

"5'6"... Not one ounce of excess fat... The left ear much bigger than the right, and malformed, but her hair always covers her ears... Lips formed a tight straight line... Small narrow nose, somewhat protruding cheekbones, broad forehead, and long, straight eyebrows... [Face is a] Pleasing oval shape... Extreme paucity of expression."

Gary, "Zone One," Colson Whitehead

Gary had a granite complexion, gray and pitted skin. Mark Spitz couldn't help but think that something bad roosted deep in his bones, uncatalogued and undiagnosable. His eye sockets were permanently sooted, his cheeks scooped out. His preferred gait was a controlled slouch, with which he slunk around corners and across rooms, the world's last junkie. Like everyone, he'd skipped plenty of meals over the last few years, though on Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing... His crazy grin. As if cleaning up after semiautomatic fire were the same as touching up dings in the plaster where the previous tenants had hung their black-and-white landscapes."

Judge Holden, "Blood Meridian," Cormac McCarthy

"An enormous man dressed in an oilcloth slicker had entered the tent and removed his hat... He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them... He was close on to seven feet in height... His face was serene and strangely childlike... His hands were small."

Keith Talent, "London Fields," Martin Amis

"Keith didn't look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer's dog. (No disrespect to Keith's dog Clive, who had signed on well before the fact, and whom Keith didn't in the least resemble anyway.) Keith looked like a murderer's dog, eager familiar of ripper or body snatcher or gravestalker. His eyes held a strange radiance--for a moment it reminded you of health, health hidden or sleeping or otherwise mysteriously absent. Though frequently bloodshot, the eyes seemed to pierce. In fact the light sprang off them. And it wasn't at all pleasant or encouraging, this one-way splendour. His eyes were television. The face itself was leonine, puffy with hungers, and as dry as soft fur. Keith's crowning glory, his hair, was thick and full-bodied; but it always had the look of being recently washed, imperfectly rinsed, and then, still slick with cheap shampoo, slow-dried in a huddled pub? the thermals of the booze, the sallowing fagsmoke. Those eyes, and their urban severity... Like the desolating gaiety of a fundless pediatric hospital (Welcome to the Peter Pan Ward), or like a criminal's cream Rolls-Royce, parked at dusk between a tube station and a flower stall, the eyes of Keith Talent shone with tremendous accommodations made to money. And murder? The eyes--was there enough blood in them for that? Not now, not yet. He had the talent, somewhere, but he would need the murderee to bring it out."

Tom Ripley, "The Talented Mr. Ripley," Patricia Highsmith

"...Combed his light-brown hair neatly in front of the mirror, and set off for Radio City. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought... Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose--or at least its general form--his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right... He wasn't really worried. Tom had at first amused himself with an eyebrow pencil--Dickie's eyebrows were longer and turned up a little at the outer edges--and with a touch of putty at the end of his nose to make it longer and more pointed, but he abandoned these as too likely to be noticed. The main thing about impersonation, Tom thought, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating, and to assume the facial expressions that went with them. The rest fell into place... He might play up Tom a little more, he thought.

He could stoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wear horn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner to contrast with Dickie's tenseness."

Edward Rochester, "Jane Eyre," Charlotte Bronte

"Mr. Rochester, his foot supported by the cushion; he was looking at Adele and the dog: the fire shone full on his face. I knew my traveller with his broad and jetty eyebrows; his square forehead, made squarer by the horizontal sweep of his black hair. I recognised his decisive nose, more remarkable for character than beauty; his full nostrils, denoting, I thought, choler; his grim mouth, chin, and jaw--yes, all three were very grim, and no mistake. His shape, now divested of cloak, I perceived harmonised in squareness with his physiognomy... My master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth."

Emma Bovary, "Madame Bovary," Gustave Flaubert

"She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age... Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down."

The Misfit, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," Flannery O'Connor

"He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun... 'You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!'... When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth... Hunching his shoulders slightly... The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking."

Humbert Humbert, "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov

"Gloomy good looks... Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice... broad shoulder... I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject's displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case... But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows... A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile... aging ape eyes... Humbert's face might twitch with neuralgia."

Tess, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles," Thomas Hardy

"She was a fine and handsome girl--not handsomer than some others, possibly--but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape... The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word... Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes... a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight down her back to her waist."

Pinkie Brown, "Brighton Rock," Graham Greene

"He had a fair smooth skin, the faintest down, and his grey eyes had an effect of heartlessness like an old man's in which human feeling has died... Grey inhuman seventeen-year-old eyes... From behind he looked younger than he was in his dark thin ready-made suit a little too big for him at the hips, but when you met him face to face he looked older, the slatey eyes were touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went... The eyes which had never been young stared with grey contempt into... The eyes which had only just begun to learn a thing or two... In the tipped mirror on the washstand he could see himself, but his eyes shifted quickly from the image of smooth, never shaven cheek, soft hair, old eyes... 'They nearly got me too,' and he raised his bandaged hand to his scarred neck."