M2M Day 46: I made a mistake

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For December, my goal is to draw a realistic self-portrait with only pencil and paper.

Today, I continued working on my self-portrait. Although it’s coming together nicely, I made a mistake upfront that’s definitely costing me now.

Before, I get to that, though, let me first share today’s progress.

My mistake

Although I’m loving the composition of my self-portrait, I’ve sadly draw everything 10–20% too small.

Take a look at the self-portrait side-by-side with the Derren Brown portrait. My head is noticeably smaller.

Again, I think this is okay compositionally, but it’s still a bit of a problem — particularly, for two reasons.

1. A smaller drawing offers smaller margins for error. If I slightly misplace the corner of the mouth or the height of the brow, the distance between the correct and incorrect placements represents a proportionally larger difference on a smaller drawing. In other words, smaller drawings are less forgiving and errors are more pronounced.
2. A smaller drawing means finer details. My pencil sharpener doesn’t seem to work very well with the pencils I have, which means I’m drawing the tiny eyelids on my self-portrait with a tree trunk. Basically, the smaller drawing requires that I work in finer areas, which is challenging with the tools I have.

Nevertheless, I will persist, since, even with the sizing mistake (and the associated challenges), I’m quite happy with the portrait so far.

In fact, challenges are probably a good thing (I hope). Ideally, they push me to become a better artist.

Anyway, I think the takeaway is that I need to invest in a better pencil sharpener…

Read the next post. Read the previous post.

Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.