ART BLOG /

ORIGINALLY POSTED • 16TH JULY 2021

Do a Drawing Every Day for a Year? Are you having a laugh? Nope! lol

In 2019, artist Rebecca Berrett invited me to join an art challenge which would see us produce 366 daily drawings from October 2019, to October 2020 *gulp*

Rebecca started the art challenge, after being inspired by the following video –

RULES?

• You had to do a Drawing Every Single Day for a Year,
• It had to be a Drawing From Your Imagination,
• My rule … It had to be Drawn on the day.

In previous challenges, like Inktober 2018, I would sometimes do 3 Ink Drawings in one day to create a buffer, so I could have a couple days rest. For this art challenge, I wanted part of the challenge to be Showing up Every day to see if it would help create a Daily Drawing Habit.

Sometimes life gets in the way, but I wanted to find out if it was possible to Make Time To Draw Every Day No Matter What Is Going On in your life.

WHY DO IT?

• Motivation and Inspiration with Rebecca Berrett,
• Practiced Skills I Struggled with,
• Started Creating Characters,
• Improved Imagination Skills,
• Started a Daily Drawing Habit,
• and because It was A Challenge :)

One of the main reasons I said yes to this Challenge, even though I was right in the middle of Inktober 2019 at the time, was because it was all about creating Art from your Imagination.

Having focused mainly on Realistic Drawings, when I finally started trying to draw from my Imagination, I soon realised how much of a totally different ball game it was.

It felt like a reset. I felt so out of my comfort zone, and disliked the quality of my Art so much, that I avoided doing it. Saying yes to this Art Challenge was the ultimate test. I was forced to not only draw from my Imagination, but to share them online too.

My daily drawings sucked at times, but I saw a massive improvement in my character designs, imagination skills, and storytelling as the months went on; I even got over the fear of sharing poopy drawings online.

KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID

31 day Art Challenges like Inktober are hard enough, but the thought of a 365 day one (366 due to it being a leap year) seemed mental. So I went into it with remembering something Will Terry said during one of his SVSLearn.com videos “Keep It Simple Stupid.”

Simple, Simple, Simple. The More Simple, the More Chance of Not Being Overwhelmed and Quitting the Challenge. So how was I going to Keep it Simple Stupid? By doing some Stupid Simple Stuff like:

• Limiting the amount of Variables
• Limiting the Tools I used
• Limiting the Paper Size and Shape
• Limiting the Subject Matter

Austin Kleon said something really cool in one of his books, something along the lines of How Limiting Yourself is Freeing. It sounds like a paradox, but it’s true.

The more limits you impose, the less chance you have of getting confused and overwhelmed, and the easier it is to get on with playing and having fun. I never found myself asking, What Paper should I use? What Tools should I use? What Subject should I Draw? I already had it all planned out.

STUPID SIMPLE TOOLS

Faber-Castell Classic Colour Pencils: To start with I only used coloured pencils as I felt most comfortable with them, and they’re relatively quick and easy to get into. I’m didn’t use my expensive Prismacolor Pencils either, instead I used a small tin of 24 cheap and cheerful Faber-Castell Classic Colour Pencils. that had been hiding in my cupboard for years :)

STUPID SIMPLE PAPER

12x12cm Art Creations Sketchbooks by Royal Talens: I also worked Stupidly Small so that I didn’t have to spend hours rending tings, I knew from experience there would be days where I’d have to get in and get out as quickly as possible lol

I like these sexy lil square sketchbooks by Royal Talens, they’re pretty inexpensive, come in a range of colours, and you get 80 pages, so that ended up being 80 days worth of drawings, or 160 if you doubled up the sides. Very professional sketchbooks too, what with their fancy ribbon dividers, and high quality off white paper.

I also used cheap £1 sketchbooks from The Works, which is a local art/book shop. These A5 sketchbooks proved to be perfect for sketching out super rough ideas before committing to the final drawing.

STUPID SIMPLE EXTRAS

Derwent Battery Operated Pencil Sharpener: I love this ting. It’s so satisfying to use, and it always helped keep my pencil tips super pointy.

0.5 Mechanical Pencil with 2B Graphite Pencil leads: my favourite combination for sketching. I only using one pencil the whole year, but it was my Super Special pencil; a silver Parker Mechanical Pencil my niece gave me as a gift back in 2014, with the words, Draw Your Heart Out engraved on it :)

Micron 0.5 Fineliner: again, Simple Simple Simple. I didn’t want to have loads of choices, so I only used one fineliner, the Micron, which become my most comfortable and favourite fineliner during Inktober 2019. It has a nice unusual beige casing, black ink with a really nice tone, and is super comfy and consistent.

Erasers: Only used two for this Art Challenge. My trusty Tombow Mono Zero Eraser Pen, which is my all time favourite Art Tool, and a Tombow Mono Sand Eraser 512A for Typewriter, which I stopped using after a few weeks as it didn’t remove ink mistakes as much as I had hoped it would..

Pencil Case: The pencil case I used didn’t have any extra tools in it other than the above, so that I wasn’t tempted or distracted by other tools :)

HOW DID IT GO?

The main thing I tried to remember, was that Wasn’t about Creating Works of Art, it was just about Showing Up To Draw and HAVING FUN :)

Here’s all 366 of my lil drawings.