Blind Children Draw Faces They Feel With Their Fingertips... ‘My Face Is Big and Round Like the Sun’ [New Book]

When the art room door opens, the smell of paper and paint fills the air. The sound of friends laughing can be heard, too. The teacher tells Jae-i that blue looks good on them. “Am I wearing blue?” Jae-i, who has never chosen clothes for themself, wonders what blue looks like and what it feels like for an outfit to suit them.My Face Is Big and Round Like the Sun, due out from Woori School on the 18th, is a picture book about art classes in which visually impaired children draw themselves. Eom Jeong-sun wrote the text and worked with Our Eyes on the illustrations. It is the second book in Eom Jeong-sun’s Art Class series.
The teacher asks the children to slowly feel their own faces before drawing them. Jae-i compares the face explored with their fingertips to the sun. They draw a sun on either side of the round face outlined in blue, worried that the insects might get cold if the face blocked the sunlight. This self-portrait also appears on the book’s cover.
The class rule is to ask permission before touching a friend’s face or artwork. Jae-i asks Chan-i, “Can I touch it?” and then feels Chan-i’s face and drawing in turn. Chan-i’s pointed chin and small lips are faithfully captured in the drawing. Jae-i recognizes Tae-o’s face from its square outline alone.
The children transfer the shapes and textures they feel with their fingertips onto paper or mold them into three-dimensional forms. One child says that after feeling several people’s faces, they found the skin soft and the hair and eyebrows as fine as thread. The child asks the teacher what people see when they call someone beautiful or ugly, even though faces share so many similarities.
The class moves from faces to the whole body. The children estimate their height and look for the part of their bodies they feel most confident about. They also think about what wishes to put into their self-portraits. Each child’s imagination adds to the features they have explored with their fingertips.
The book is based on an art project Eom Jeong-sun has continued for around 30 years since founding Our Eyes in 1996. All the illustrations and sculptural works in the book were created jointly by visually impaired children and visual artists.
In 2023, Eom presented the installation Elephant Without a Trunk at the 14th Gwangju Biennale. Tracing the journey of the first elephant to arrive on the Korean Peninsula during the Joseon dynasty, Eom has continued working in painting and sculpture. Elephants were also the subject of art projects with visually impaired students. Visitors could touch the life-size work themselves. At this exhibition, Eom was named the first recipient of the Park Seo-bo Art Award.
The series’ first book, When You Touch an Elephant, which won the Special Prize at the 2025 Korea Picture Book Awards, follows the process of children touching an elephant they had imagined and then creating works with artists. In the new book, which also focuses on sensations at the fingertips, Eom encourages readers to slowly feel their own faces and ask themselves, “How will I draw myself?” 48 pages, 18,000 won.
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