How Art Challenges Made Me a Better Artist
(Watch the YouTube video!)
There are tons of different art challenges; I think there’s a popular challenge every month—Inktober, plain airpril, creatuanuary, huevember, mermay, to name a few. Usually, influencer artists start a challenge with a hashtag. And it spreads throughout the community.
Participating in art challenges has become almost a norm, especially in recent years. And there are benefits in doing so:
You become part of the artists' community.
If your work is good enough, you can have exposure and grow your audience.
You can experiment and try new things.
And last but not least, you have fun.
They are also supposed to encourage people to draw every day and become better artists by improving their skills. (I’m not sure about this one, but I’ll get back to it later.)
On the opposite side, I’ve seen artists, even professional ones, resist participating in these hashtag art challenges. So let’s look at the disadvantages:
There's pressure to draw every day, and if you skip one, then there’s a feeling of failure.
There’s also a direct comparison with amazing artists, and for some of us, that can be discouraging.
Another negative I’ve seen recently is the obsession with getting followers and growing an audience. Of course, I understand the interest in that; we all want an audience. Still, I’ve seen artists, beginners especially, focusing on the followers more than on their drawing skills.
I think the most significant disadvantage, and this is something that happens to me, so I know this by experience. Is that, I would prepare myself to draw daily for one month. I would accomplish the 30 or 31 drawings and be happy with my results, but then, when the challenge was over, I wouldn’t draw. Instead of being constant with my practice and growth, I would grind during that particular month and never grind the same for the rest of the year. I was treating drawing as a sprint when it’s a marathon.
Looking at the “improving your skills” benefit and the disadvantages. I think there are better ways to improve and be a better artist. Don’t get me wrong, the act alone of drawing every day will make you progress. It’s just that I don’t think these particular challenges are very beginner-friendly.
Introduciiiiing the “Make Your Own Personal Challenge”… Challenge!
Anybody can create their own challenge, and you can choose to share or not your results on social media. You don’t need to be a professional artist, you don’t need to be popular, and your challenge can be whatever you want. For example, look at this Haikyuu themed challenge. So just like you can make a challenge to satisfy your love for an IP and draw fan-arts during a month. You can also make a personal challenge to focus on improving what you want and need.
That’s what I did on my Drawing Leveling Up challenge. I don’t intend for other artists to follow it. It doesn’t have a theme; it’s not a hashtag with prompts. When I started it, I had no idea where it was going. If you see the videos, you’ll notice that I change my mind from one day to the next. I just wanted to improve my anatomy drawing, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. Committing to a challenge was the best way I found to force myself to study daily.
I want to show you the challenge an animator did: zoray99 on Instagram. They uploaded a daily animation exercise throughout a whole year. It was rough, focused on learning and improving. Look how simple this day’s animation is, they wanted to really understand what was happening here. Doing that for a whole year is impressive, and I’m guessing Zoray feels satisfied with the achievement, but more importantly, how much they learned.
So if you’re a beginner artist and the well-known hashtag art challenges overwhelm you, you can create your challenge to improve at your own pace. You only have to set up doable boundaries:
The first you need is a time limit; this is important because the ending and objective are not clear without a time limit, affecting your commitment and confidence. For a daily challenge, a month would be ideal. But you can also choose to draw every other day instead of daily. You can also say something like, “I’ll draw daily on this sketchbook with a 15-minute time limit until I finish it.” Those boundaries are helpful because maybe you don’t have a lot of time to spend on drawing.
Another useful boundary is a prompt list. Sometimes we spend more time thinking about what to draw than drawing. If you want to evolve as an artist, I recommend following a book and study from it. Or you can focus on a specific study subject you want to improve, like “sketching backgrounds for 15 days”.
Another thing is that, for hashtag challenges, most of us try to make finished illustrations with ink and color and everything. So you can also determine how far you want to go with each drawing, simple sketches, ink, and painting? You decide.
My personal challenge’s boundaries were: drawing daily for 30 days following the lessons and tutorials of artists on youtube. That way, I didn’t have to think about what to draw, the “prompts” were their videos, and also, my sketches didn’t even need to be clean. This challenge’s purpose was to study.
The best part is that you control your challenge and improvement. If there are things you struggle with, you can repeat and practice them more. You can also slowly increase the difficulty. That’s what I did when I implemented the animated anatomy studies.
With a personal challenge, you can focus on self-growth. And leave the hashtag challenges to have fun, experiment, and be part of the community.
Ok, but does making a personal challenge help you improve? Mine finished on May 30. Am I a better artist now?
To measure my drawing improvement, I made some life drawing exercises in “class” format, and then without a time limit, I drew some poses from my imagination. Comparing them to day 11 and day 16 of my challenge, I think I improved a little, drawing-wise speaking.
The biggest difference is not in my skills, though. It’s in my mindset. I feel the challenge made me feel better while drawing. I feel less stressed and with more confidence. I am still doing the anatomy animations I started on day 21, even though the daily challenge ended. So it also gave me the boost I needed to keep grinding forward. Like a marathon, not a sprint. And that’s what matters the most.
If you feel artistically stuck, or you’re not enjoying drawing as much as you once did, or you want to polish your skills or learn something new, you can make a personal challenge and focus it on self-improvement. It’s hugely motivating for other artists and me to see someone challenging themself, and coming out better.
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