M2M Day 50: Pure black

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 only had ten minutes to draw, so I spent all ten darkening the hair and eyebrows on my self-portrait, until they were as black as I could get them.

This greatly improved the portrait in two ways:

1. The relative tones of the face to the hair are much more accurate now, which helps with realism.
2. The shape of the hair on the left side of the portrait wasn’t quite right, so this gave me the chance to fix it.

Here’s the before…

And the after

At first, the blackness of the hair is a bit jarring, but it accurately represents the “exposure” I’m going for (where the hair is emitting no light, and thus, shows up as pure black).

Although today’s darkening session improved things, the portrait still seems a bit odd and unbalanced because of the nakedness of the mouth and cheek. I’ll start tackling those areas tomorrow.

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.