My self-portrait looked like a hybrid of a comatose Native American and an Italian grandmother. I’m neither of those. I was a twenty-one year old Asian male. We had to pin-up our self-portrait on the wall for the entire class to critique. This was the very first assignment in freshman-drawing and I suppose the instructors didn’t want to intimidate us with anything too difficult. Everyone else in class had done hundreds of drawings of themselves in highschool-art, and you could tell. I transferred from the biology department from Mellon College of Science. In my biology classes like the “Sex-Determination Mechanism of Caenorhabditis Elegans” you just don’t need to know how to draw your face. This not-too-difficult assignment was a nightmare. Out of the 55 students, mine was the worst. Worst as in 54 of them were identifiable and so by default this last one must be mine.

Few months later, I walked by a street vendors that’ll draw a very good portrait of you. Not the characture of you but the ones that actually looks like you. They’re usually asian for some reason. He was drawing a little girl seated, who was not particularly patient and probably forced there by their parents that can’t get enough of her cuteness. You could see the drawer over his shoulder… this was the perfect opportunity to learn the self-portrait skills that had crushed my ego! My plan was to gain insights into drawing a proper life-like self-portrait from THIS guy. So I watched him perform. His initial charcoal facial outlines didn’t look like the girl at all. But he erased parts of it, looked at her, drew some more, erased some more, and drew again. The process repeated. Eventually the charcoal drawing came to life and there it was 30 minutes and $15 later the little girl had been transferred onto a piece of paper. What struck me then was that the Eraser was just as important as the pencil.

They teach you to use a #2 pencil from the Kindergarten, but they don’t teach you how to use the pink nub that lies at the other end. The eraser used by the street-drawer symbolized something much greater than removal of charcoal. The use of that eraser gave me a peak into his mind. To use the eraser properly, it required the ability to Self-Critique. When you’re learning hard skills its important to be able to ask yourself “What’s wrong with this?” objectively look at your work, have an answer to fix it, and adjust as necessary. As a beginner drawer I didn’t know the answer. I can see my face on the page and know it was wrong but I didn’t know how to fix it. I thought it was all about drawing quantity, that if I drew twice as much as everyone else, I would be equal to them by the time I graduated. What quickly propelled me forward and made me just as good as everyone else, was learning how to user an “eraser”.

Ever since then, any new creative skill I try to learn, singing, playing guitar, fashion illustration, learning a new language or anything else, the faster I was able to identify how to use an “eraser” where I can objectively look at my own work and evolve as necessary, the faster my work became better. You don’t need to wait for an instructor or an expert to come around to give you feedback, you can give it to yourself, increasing the evolution speed and iteration until the rise of the perfect design. Everyone is taught how to use a pencil, but not everyone is taught how to use an eraser. The Eraser is the key to rapid skill evolvement.