children’s drawings turn into playful makeup looks in ‘draw me a face’ project
‘draw me a face’ project turns kids imagination into makeup
Playful freedom forms the starting point for Draw Me A Face, a collaborative project by Paris-based creative studio Buro Nōto, photographer Pierre-Emmanuel Testard and makeup artist Tiziana Raimondo. Instead of asking artists to imagine new beauty looks, the team asked children to draw directly onto portraits, translating their spontaneous sketches into fully realised makeup compositions.
The resulting portraits feel both unfamiliar and strangely intuitive. Graphic shapes stretch across faces without concern for balance or proportion, while vivid colours occupy places conventional beauty rarely allows. Freed from aesthetic expectations, the children’s drawings produce compositions that feel expressive rather than corrective.
At its core, the project doesn’t treat childhood as a nostalgic theme, but as a creative methodology. Instinct takes precedence over expertise, and imagination becomes more valuable than technical perfection. The children are not simply collaborators, but rather become designers of an entirely different visual language.
all images by @petestard
play as creative design tool
Throughout design history, innovation has often emerged from questioning inherited rules. ‘Draw Me A Face’ reaches the same conclusion through play. By handing authorship to children, the project temporarily suspends the invisible conventions that shape contemporary beauty culture.
The result is neither fantasy nor costume. It is an experiment in perception. The portraits invite viewers to reconsider where beauty begins—not in mastery, but in curiosity. Play becomes less an escape from creative practice than a method for expanding it.
the children’s drawings produce compositions that feel expressive rather than corrective
relearning imagination
What makes ‘Draw Me A Face’ so compelling is its quiet reversal of expertise. Adults spend years refining taste, learning proportion and internalising visual codes. Children simply make marks that feel right. The project suggests that creativity sometimes depends less on acquiring knowledge than on recovering a way of seeing that has gradually been edited out of us. In that sense, these portraits are not about childhood at all. They are about remembering that imagination often arrives before instruction—and that the most original ideas can emerge when we stop trying to get things right.
play becomes less an escape from creative practice than a method for expanding it
project info:
name: Draw Me a Face
photographer: Pierre Testard | @petestard
creative director: Aurélie Joly & Buro Nōto | @buronoto
makeup: Tiziana Raimondo | @tizianaraimondo
hair: Marion Anee | @marion.anee
special thanks to the children: Nori, Mila, Jeanne, Billie, Simone, Raphaël Leor, Akiro,
Romane, Daria, Hannah & Jacques
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