Drawing challenges are a great way to stay in practice, find new artistic inspiration, and keep accountable to a regular drawing practice. Through daily drawing prompts supplied by others, you can find yourself trying new things and venturing outside your comfort zone.
Here, we offer a few tips for getting started and staying on track with a month-long sketch-a-day challenge.
Getting Started
Getting off on the right start will increase your chances of staying on track with your daily drawing challenge.
-
- First, choose your challenge. They are often done on a monthly basis, such as Sketchtember in September or Inktober in October. Others have themes, like Mermay in May, in which you’ll be prompted to draw a certain type of mermaid or mer-person each day.TIP: To find a month of drawing prompts, check out our Journaling Tips section, where we occasionally post drawing challenges. You can also search online for “monthly art challenge” or “a drawing a day”. You can also create your own sketch-a-day challenge, or do so with friends.
- Next, decide on a style. Will you do the challenge by hand or electronically? If you work by hand, as is the intent of most drawing challenges, decide on your medium. Will you draw in pencil, marker, pastel, ink, watercolour, or…?
- Finally, prepare your creative space for the challenge. This can be as simple as having your chosen drawing tools and paper out in plain sight and ready for use. This lowers the barrier to getting to your drawing challenge each day. Our Drawing Challenge Journals can help with preparation.
Staying On Track
Accountability is key to staying on track with a drawing challenge. Each day, take a picture of your drawing, painting, or sketch and post it to social media along with its appropriate hashtag, like #inktober. Also follow the hashtag so you will see and be inspired by others doing the same challenge.
Even if you create your own challenge, showcasing your efforts publicly will help motivate you to be consistent. Let your followers know what you’re up to and post a picture of your daily creation.
Finally, dedicate a special sketchbook to each month’s drawing challenge It helps stay on track and is a motivator to fill every page and complete the book within the month.
Make Time to Reflect
You’ll get even more out of your daily drawing activity if you spend a bit of time reflecting on each piece. Take a few moments to jot down things like:
-
-
- The process you used to create the piece
- Challenges you faced with the prompt
- How you feel about the final piece
- Anything you learned about yourself, your process, technique, or materials while creating the piece
-
Drawing Challenge Journals
We created Drawing Challenge Journals especially for capturing a full month of daily sketches or drawings. Each sketchbook contains pages for 31 days of art challenges. Each one is thoughtfully designed with two pages per day: one page for planning and doodling and the next page to feature your Instagram-ready final creation. Each drawing page is also protected from bleed-through and transfer with a blank facing page.
