I gave frontier LLMs a canvas and told them to draw a self-portrait

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I gave frontier LLMs a canvas and told them to draw a self-portrait.

Ismael Robles-Razzaq

August 4, 2026

Here are the self-portraits for Fable 5, GPT 5.6 Sol, Kimi K3, and Qwen 3.8 Max - out of order.<br>Can you guess which one is which?

Pause

turn 0<br>0.5&times;

Reveal

Interesting, right!? The Fable 5 one felt very claudey to me. Also notable is the uncanny resemblance of the 5.6 Sol drawing to Leopold Ashenbrenner at such an eventful time for him.

In this blog post, I'll lay out the motivation, results, and machinery of this benchmark. I ran it on the following models:

Model<br>Release date

GPT 5<br>August 2025

GPT 5.4<br>March 2026

GPT 5.6 Luna<br>July 2026

GPT 5.6 Terra<br>July 2026

GPT 5.6 Sol<br>July 2026

Haiku 4.5<br>October 2025

Opus 5<br>July 2026

Fable 5<br>June 2026

Kimi K3<br>July 2026

Qwen 3.8 Max<br>August 2026

All models were set to use max effort possible1. I called OpenAI and Anthropic models through their respective APIs, Qwen 3.8 Max to Alibaba through OpenRouter, and Kimi K3 to Moonshot through Openrouter as well2.

Background + motivation

After reading this blog post from tryai about benchmarking frontier LLMs on recreating the Mona Lisa and Starry Night, I became very curious about LLM's using art tools. It seems obvious that giving an LLM the ability to wield art tools like a human is a more apt benchmark of creative ability than having a model blindly generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bike. Furthermore, this is more likely an OOD task.

The purpose of this benchmark is twofold:

to extend the frontier LLM drawing benchmark to a fully open-ended creative task

to genuinely see how models choose to depict themselves3

To that end, my benchmark is a purely subjective measure of the "artness" and "portraitness" of the drawings - the more it looks like a drawing by a real artist, the higher it'll rank.

Here are the drawing processes for each model, displayed as a video playing through each 512x512 canvas. Below are the link to the full transcript of each drawing, their own descriptions of the drawing, my rating out of 10, and the total cost.

Pause

turn 0 / 200<br>0.5&times;

I was most impressed by Fable. It was the only model to deliberately depict itself more abstractly because it "feels honest to what I actually am". You can see its internal dialogue here. Its drawing prowess also surprised me. It consistently and accurately applies many blurs in a single tool call, something that other models struggle with.

I was also impressed by 5.6 Terra because its drawing feels the most stylistic - you can imagine an artist actually depicting themselves this way.

Another thing I wanna note is Opus 5's process. Besides drawing an uncanny, slightly terrifying portrait, it was the model that took the most turns4. It erased and redid parts of its drawings the most. I speculate that the reason Fable didn't do this is because it was able to correctly draw what it wanted to draw the first time, eliminating any need for re-doing.

Qwen 3.8 Max was ok, and I was disappointed by Kimi K3. All older models - GPT 5, GPT 5.4, Haiku 4.5 - did quite poorly, which shows how much visual understanding, reasoning, and tool calling have improved even in the last 6 months.

I think overall this was a fun exercise. It's clear that the models are improving in capability, yet are still are a far cry from real art. One thing to note is that the harness is fairly rudimentary - I think that putting significant effort into creating a better harness could result in much better outputs.

Agent Harness

I started with the environment provided by tryai's painting reconstruction benchmark.<br>However, the outputs don't look like drawings at all. After several iterations, I ended up with a harness I'm happy with (GitHub: github.com/iroblesrazzaq/canvas-arena). Here's the before and after of the harness using GPT 5.6 Luna:

before

after

The model has the following tools:

Tool<br>Function

view_canvas<br>look at the current drawing

set_color / set_brush / set_pressure<br>pencil colour, tip width, how hard you press

draw<br>a batch of marks: strokes, lines, outlines, dots

smudge<br>blend regions

erase<br>lift regions back to white

clear_canvas<br>wipe the page

finish<br>submit and end the run

The goal is to give the agent enough tools to be able to sufficiently create a drawing and make the canvas look realistic. For the realistic canvas, I set pigment to only darken, added imperfections that simulate how pencils actually draw, and added a field that simulates how pencils mark plant fiber as a function of how "high" the pixel is and how much pressure is applied. That is, a high fiber catches more pigment --> is darker.

I gave each model 200 turns to finish their drawing. A turn is defined as one response from the model - that can be drawing, looking, or just thinking. Also, the model can write multiple draws or smudges in the same tool call.

Every model finished in under 200...