International Self Portrait Day is a fake real holiday where you draw a self portrait. Then you post it to this Facebook page, this TCS thread, OR BOTH. I highly encourage everyone to participate even if you don't consider yourself a drawer.
The purpose is to track your progress by looking at the self portraits you create each year. I will post my past self portraits in this thread later. In the mean time, I'll post the progress of a couple of other artists. And if I can discover the names of the artists I'll edit this post to include credit.
This event began on conceptart.org, an excellent art community which died a horrible death years ago due to mismanagement. Before that happened, the community was one of the very few places an inexperienced artist could go to learn how to improve their skills. I believe Self Portrait Day was inspired by Android Jones, a digital artist on ConceptArt who did one self portrait every day for a year. Here is one of them.
Self portraits are a great drawing exercise because the best and fastest way to improve your skills is to draw from life. The closest living object is yourself, and you are also more willing to sit still than most living objects are. That said, if you want to draw from a photo of yourself I won't hold it against you, and it's still very much a worthwhile activity. It's a real challenge to draw facial features, because our minds are programmed to notice the peculiarities of faces, more so than other objects. (Unless perhaps you have face blindness.)
Self portraits are intimidating so I won't be surprised if I'm the only person here who does this event, but I hope somebody else is brave enough to try it. I created the thread for November 1st but it may be used for self portraits created on other days of the year as well.