THE TITLE IS FIGURATIVE. I'm bad at math but not THAT bad.

As much as I should just be strong and move on from drawing eye after eye after eye (because when it comes down to it, "they're fun to draw" comes before any deeper messages I'm tacking on). . . IT'S FUN. And I always flub the proportions when I'm doing a full realistic portrait, so this allows me to work the "drawing my characters in a realistic style" bug out of my system without too much frustration and disappointment.

Left to right/top then bottom:

Harlan: Believes in love. When the evening news gets grim he holds fast to the belief that it is mankind's redeeming quality and saving grace.
He makes art because he has to. He makes art out of love for the world and a driving need to open his heart and soul to it. One of his core principles is that humanity is a whole and that a lot of age-old problems will be solved when we realize that we're all fundamentally the same.

Arjay: Makes the best of what she has. She has moved past being upset over her rather macabre lot in life. She doesn't ask why; she asks how do I deal with it?
She's completely neutral and as unobtrusive as possible. She doesn't believe in good and evil as such, but she has a strong respect for life. She bases her actions on a sort of moral economy.

Haley: Wants to change the world, but she doesn't know how. She's never felt like she fit in with anyone and she has a hard time connecting with other people or expressing herself on a more than superficial level. She wants to be loved and accepted, but not at the cost of her identity.

Michael: Can't stand himself. He feels like a failure who is stuck on a track of failure. He's begun to deal with this by seeking temporary escapes in the form of fighting--more specifically, getting beaten to the point of either numbness or of actually feeling more than he does in his normal day-to-day life. He is starting to give up sulking over his personal shortcomings in favor of not caring how pathetic he may or may not be.

Helix: Believes that to take responsibilty for one's self and to even believe in that self is a choice that creates unnecessary complications. As far as he's concerned, he doesn't exist.
But he's no nihilist--he has turned himself over to destiny as a willing pawn. Whether or not that destiny asks terrible things of him is irrelevant.

James: Wants to know what's wrong with the world. All of the petty social cruelties he sees around him have driven him so far into himself that he often fails to realize how viciously he judges others and how much of a superiority complex he's grown.

Edgar: Thinks that to live is to be an artist. The act of choosing clothes in the morning, going to work, raising children or going to war--all are acts of expression and therefore art. The more mundane, the less pretentious and therefore more profound. He dreams of a world where people share this view and respect each other's actions accordingly. He is sure that to view every action as art is to confer a new level of respect and tolerance on all human endeavors.

Dingo: Is very, very tired of being himself. He fights terrible depressions by banishing unsettling thoughts with forced cheer and a quirky, frivolous attention to his appearance. His mood cycles from debilitating bouts of fatalism up to going through the motions and then into genuine manic cheer which eventually burns out and leaves him depressed again.
He's is both too afraid of change and too convinced that he's condemned to it to look for a way out of this cycle, but the mental strain it causes is getting unbearable.

............

I chose these characters because they're currently some of the closest/most important to me. They're the eyes through which I see the world.