Voldemort's Deformities

A friend of mine asked this in another forum, about the Biophilia Illustrated Edition, and I thought it was worth posting my reply here, too.

One thing that occurred to me though: was it a deliberate choice to give Voldy more nose and a less reptilian face or is this just the building blocks of the program you use to create this art (I am totally not familiar with those programs so forgive me if this is a stupid question..)

Not a stupid question at all, and it's a bit of both. It does get harder to distort the nose the more extreme you go, because there are internal shapes involved. (That is, it's not just the nose itself, it's also the nostrils). I could do it, with a lot of work, but once it started to get into that territory, I guess I started to feel uneasy.

I've never been 100% comfortable with how JKR, to some extent, and more so the movies managed most of the Death Eaters (Malfoys excluded). It was like there's this rather ugly shorthand at work, that ugliness/deformity/poor hygiene = evil, and I've never been comfortable with that. I mean, okay, Bella's hair and teeth can be explained away by Azkaban (although in some shots she has this pronounced overbite as well, which Helena doesn't have and it wouldn't have been Azkaban). And some of Tom's ugliness can be explained away by the rebirthing, but only some. His teeth should have been immaculately clean, for instance, even if they were poorly shaped - they were brand new - and the thing about red eyes just seemed silly. The whole idea of Voldemort's backstory, even if JKR played this down for present-day Voldemort, is that he's a tragically damaged and horrifyingly dangerous human. And there's no apparent reason at all for people like Goyle and Macnair to have been physically ugly. I mean, I'm not saying they should all have been beautiful either, but there was a bit of a beautiful-good-people/ugly-bad-people thing that left a really bad taste in my mouth.

So when the time came to do Voldemort, I did a really nice likeness of Ralph Fiennes (with nose), but I knew I would need some sort of deformity for Biophilia because it's a plot point, although it's never described in detail. So I altered the nose as far as I could with the tools in the main composition software, but when the time came to export it to modelling software to finish the likeness, I sort of thought, you know, I'm really not sure I want to go there. Which was a bit of a break for me, because I do like my movie likenesses, but...yeah.