Make Your Own Head Day

What the day is

Make Your Own Head Day is observed on November 28. It is a craft prompt, popular in schools and art classes, asking you to produce your own head in any medium you like.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

What it asks for is the self-portrait, which endures partly because it is the one subject an artist can always get hold of. Rembrandt produced roughly eighty across his working life, and taken in sequence they form an unusually honest record of a face aging and a fortune collapsing. Van Gogh painted more than thirty in under a decade, substantially because he could not afford to pay models. Albrecht Dürer's frontal self-portrait of 1500 borrowed a composition previously reserved for religious images, which was a considerable thing to do with your own face.

The exercise is harder than it looks, for a specific reason. You know your own face from mirrors, and a mirror shows you a reversed version of it. A much-replicated study found that people prefer photographs of their own face when flipped to match the mirror image, while their friends prefer the unflipped original. Each group prefers the version it has seen more often, which is why your own photographs look subtly wrong to you and entirely normal to everybody else.

The other reliable difficulty is proportion. Beginners almost always set the eyes too high. The eyes sit near the vertical midpoint of the whole head, and the amount of skull above them is consistently underestimated.

How to take part

• Work from a mirror rather than a photograph, then compare the result against a photograph.
• Mark the halfway line of the head first and put the eyes on it.
• Try a medium with volume, such as clay or papier-mache, which forces you to account for the back of the head.
• Give children the full range of materials. The medium is the least important part of the exercise.
• Keep the first attempt. Comparing it later is the entire point.