In this art challenge battle, I put four pro artists on the clock to draw an exquisite corpse portrait—but with a nasty little twist. We had 60 minutes total, and the only reference allowed was four plaster casts: an eye, a nose, an ear, and a mouth. Every five minutes we rotated the casts, so your “reference” kept changing while you tried to fuse totally disconnected parts into one cohesive illustration. Everybody used the same variable lined ink pen, so it was all about decisions, line economy, and committing to the weird. What I love about this setup is it rewards both anatomy knowledge and imagination. One artist starts with the nose because it’s the center of the face (big nose solidarity), another grabs the eye because “window to the soul,” someone goes full Mr. Potato Head with the mouth, and somebody even commits to a 3/4 angle and a third eye right out of the gate. The big takeaway: you can’t cling to the model—this challenge forces you to invent, simplify, and keep the proportions believable enough to read, even when it’s getting surreal. By the end, we’re comparing what worked (strong foundations, clear focal points) and what we’d push further (proportions, line refinement, shading).