How we chose the winners: watch a video of Rachel Campbell-Johnston, Grayson Perry and their fellow judges sift through the entries, decide their favourites and explain their choices

You were interested in your acne and how your hair looked. We were interested in honesty, courage and lack of self-consciousness. And on Monday our mutual concerns met. A panel of judges that included a professor of drawing, Stephen Farthing; the Turner prize-winning artist Grayson Perry; Ann Coxon and Joanne Bernstein, museum curators; Anna Cutler, head of Interpretation at Tate Modern and myself, an art critic, assembled to assess the entries for the Tate Times Drawing Challenge.

This competition, launched in The Times a few weeks ago, was designed to encourage young people to pursue a traditional artistic skill. It invited anyone from 11 to 18 to pick up their pencils and submit a self-portrait, the best of which would be displayed in the Tate. The response was phenomenal; there were more than 1,000 entries.

The self-portrait is fundamental to Western art history. Over the centuries it has become a touchstone of talent. From the precision of Jan Van Eyck (whose 1433 painting of a man in a red turban is assumed to be him) through the psychological explorations of Rembrandt, or the obsessive self-depictions of Edvard Munch to the giant pixellated compositions of Chuck Close, it has varied enormously in purpose and style.

The Tate Times Drawing Challenge set strict parameters. The images were to be drawn on A4 paper in pencil, crayon or charcoal. But still the judges encountered a variety that ranged in style from the Elizabethan miniature to the Manga comic, with anything from Pointillism through Cubism to Expressionism in between. But portraits executed to a formula often adopted a style at the expense of content. Though competence was applauded, the judges were looking for more than a technical skill.

A self-portrait can be about ruthless honesty. But, equally, it can be all about ways of dissembling. Artists can rival actors when it comes to obscuring or embellishing themselves.Think of the difference between that public face that you practise in the mirror and that embarrassing grimace in the camera snap. The construction of an image involves dozens of decisions. To study a self-portrait is to understand how an artist wants to be seen. In the case of young people it would seem that for every tangle-tressed teenager who would like to imagine themselves as some soft-focus fashion model there is another who is keen for the world to know that they are lurking alone and misunderstood in their rooms. Despite all the worst intentions, a self-portrait reveals how its sitter sees the world.

The judges were looking for a vision that seemed enlivening or truthful, courageous or unselfconsciously fresh. Sometimes the panel burst out laughing at the sheer exuberance – though that was mostly in the work of the younger entrants before the toothy grins gave way to grimacing teenage angst. Here were pictures of young people doing anything from brushing their teeth, to donning funny hats to listening to iPods. Here was a girl with spiders’ legs instead of hair, there a self-portrait as a skull, here was a boy morphing with his guitar, there was a young person as a pair of feet. There were some novel compositions: on a mobile screen or on the back of a spoon. But the most interesting images were less selfconsciously presented: it was as if the sitters had been caught off guard by themselves.

The judges tended to prefer the pictures in which the artist had really tried to look in a mirror rather than copy the surface of a photograph. “Drawing a self-portrait is not about copying your face, it is about developing a memory for it,” says Stephen Farthing, professor of drawing at University of the Arts, London. “The best images,” he says, “are those done by someone who has spent time drawing from life, not just trying to make pictures that look as if they are finished.” Most of the most obviously perfect images were passed over by the panel. “The distortions and quirks are where the subconscious leaks out,” Grayson Perry says.

It was notable how many entrants mapped out the spots on their faces. Clearly this matters a lot to a teenager. Hair was another obsession, though several got so caught up that their images were more like advertisements for L’Oréal. They weren’t worth it. Most judges preferred the bad-hair days of entrants such as 13-year-old Daniel Adkins, in whose self-portrait the hair took on a character all of its own. It was also striking how the early teen entrants were predominantly girls. Maybe the boys had found better things to do during the last Easter holidays than be bullied by parents into drawing for The Times. But by the age of 15 the boys are back in force.

The judges’ final selection of some three dozen images, which you will be able to see at Tate Modern from this weekend, may well, appear pretty traditional. They are predominantly monochrome portraits of the face, drawn in pencil. It is not that there were not several variations, but often the more alternative images were striking simply because they were different and not because they were possessed of any inherently special quality. A few of the quirkier ones, however, got through, not least among them a portrait of the sitter as Elizabeth I. “That’s what I would have done,” announced Grayson Perry, the cross-dresser who delights in the extravagant regalia of his female alter-ego.

In the end, a selection is always an awkward cross of subjective taste and compromise to the group. But among the entrants to this challenge a handful of images earned particular comment. Nathan Hardy, who came from the Chisenhale Studio Young People’s Art Group, was admired for the energy and confidence of a drawing that took risks but didn’t depend upon luck. Duncan McKinnon, from London, created a wonderfully nebulous sense of his presence in a portrait in which he seemed almost to have erased himself. Ashleigh Kitchen was admired for the sophistication of a treatment that recognised that different areas of her face demanded different degrees of attention, and Jamie Clough, from Derbyshire, was commended for the confidence of a classically executed image.

I was particularly charmed by a portrait by Charlotte Barnes, aged 13, her open face floating on the surface of the paper, and a picture by Noah Rogers, aged 11, from Oxford, done with a clear-eyed directness and energy that brooked no debate.

Drawing may be unfashionable – and not least in our art colleges. But it was heartening to see not only how naturally talented so many of the entrants were, but also how naturally drawing could be taught. Three of the self-portraits were by pupils of the English Martyrs Sixth Form College, Hartlepool. Where some schools submitted work that arrived in cloned clumps, here, it seems, is a teacher who knows how to tease out and develop innate talent. And that matters.

Drawing is a means of expression as much as writing and mathematics. It’s a tool to be sharpened so that you can take it out when you need it and do whatever you want. But what does this competition tell us about British children? Do we nurture the most miserable offspring in Europe as a recent survey suggested? I saw few signs of it. Here was a boy who presented himself in a pair of the sort of bedroom slippers that would not have disgraced his granddad, there was a girl in Alice-band and pearls. I could almost hear the echo of parents’ voices: “Aren’t you going to brush your hair nicely before you sit down and draw?”

This competition offered a portrait of a youth that, for all the occasional revelling in snarling teenage angst, was engaged, enthusiastic and eager. But then maybe that’s more a reflection of the art world than our children. Once, young people aspired to be bankers and doctors and lawyers. Then Brit Art came along. And who wants to go to the office when they could be an artist?

See the 34 shortlisted entrants to the Tate Times Drawing Challenge in the main atrium of Level 7, Tate Modern, London SE1, May 25-28 as part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend, 10-6pm, free (020-7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk )

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