Today’s sketch might not look like much, yet it demonstrates something crucial, me seeing that I made a huge mistake and correcting it while drawing. That hasn’t happened before. I usually need a few hours to be able to spot such flaws in my drawing. The hope is that I can spot them before I put down my marks onto the digital canvas.

A rough blue sketch depicts an elderly person's face and upper body.

As the process video shows, I started by carefully placing a few guidelines after guesstimating the proportions of the face by eyeballing them. Then I rattled down a face-drawing algorithm, which resulted in the mistake. I had forgotten to closely observe angles in the contours of the face. While I’d done some rough shading and compared the result with the reference, I noticed what I had done wrong. I hadn’t noticed it from the frail blue lines alone. Whatever sense is needed to immediately see what’s wrong, that sense is rather blurry in me, clearly.

A process video of a blue pencil sketch depicting an elderly man's portrait with detailed facial features.

I suppose my “algorithm” wasn’t any good. Next time I should roughly sketch in the contours of the face, observing the angles of straight lines I need to draw. I believe this resembles what in navigation is called dead reckoning. I need to get better at navigating the structure of the head. In a male portrait it makes sense to mostly use straight lines, while in female portraits bent lines (arcs) make more sense.

The more abstract approach of construction out of simple shapes is still a bit beyond me. I’m used to draw what I see, not the unseen structure below what is visible on the surface. In drawing portraits realistically, it might help to do just that, see the underlying structure in the mind’s eye. I probably will get there, eventually.

Mind you, I find these mini self-reviews useful, since it puts my dissatisfaction about the sketch into words. I suppose that’s the difference between (mindless) doodling and (intentionally) making art. Making art one reasons about the result (and intermediate results), instead of ignoring it and just do it for fun. There’s still fun in making art, of course, and an additional drive to get better at it. I realize not everyone has a drive for self-improvement, and the one in myself is rather weak.

IOW, I mostly doodle. Well, that’s all and fine, but just a few minutes in a day I want to self-educate and self-improve. The rest of the day I can go about my life as I’m used to.