#100DayArtistChallenge #100DayArtist
My blog has been reopened! Just like that, without much fanfare. I have a few things to say about starting it up again, but I think I’ll save that for a future post. Today I wanted to officially announce my participation in a new art challenge.
Cue fanfare.
October is a very popular time for online art events – Inktober and its various offshoots (Brushtober, Drawtober etc.) have made it a great time to push yourself, produce a bunch of new drawings and grow your audience. I’ve participated once before, and had a great time – it really upped my confidence with ink pens and brushes, and I’m still really proud of some of the drawings I did back then.
I was thinking about taking part again this year, but ultimately I decided I needed something different. I have drawing projects sitting in the wings that I never quite manage to get off the ground, things I really want to finish and show, because I think they have a lot of potential and I think there are people out there who would really enjoy them.
I didn’t need a “post a new drawing every day” challenge.
I needed a “work behind the scenes on an important project every day” challenge.
Don’t get me wrong. The former are super valuable and there is absolutely a place for them. I’d love to do another one soon – you learn so much, you gain so much momentum, and the sense of community you get when everybody is throwing around similarly themed images is really, really cool.
But I have some other things to work out. About art and fear 1. About working consistently on big things, about committing to projects, about maintaining excitement about your current work instead of jumping onto the newest, shiny thing.
Enter the 100 Day Artist Challenge, brain child of Mitch Bowler, founder of premium artist community Pencil Kings 2. He was inspired to start this challenge by a robotics engineer on Youtube who was posting daily video footage of the robot he was designing. Every day he would try a new configuration, a new set of algorithms, and every day the robot would try to walk and ultimately stumble and fall. But regardless, he continued to try new approaches every single day, and recorded those attempts to look back on later.
What a great parallel to what it’s like to try and improve your art, or any skill for that matter.
The idea of this 100 Day Artist Challenge is to continuously work on a larger project every day for three months, without fear of failure, without putting it off, without thinking you need to improve your skills before you can start or proceed. Learning by doing. Jump in the deep end. And then, at the end of the 100 days, you look back and see your manifested project – you see just how much you have produced and how much your skills have improved.
Mitch is using his 100 day challenge to kickstart his Youtube channel. He is something of a specialist when it comes to art education, with tons of amazing and insightful advice to share with struggling artists and illustrators like myself. I’ve personally benefited a lot from his advice. But by his own admission, he’s always had issues with being in front of the camera and producing content featuring himself directly. So he created this challenge for himself as much as he did for other artists around him.
That is exactly what I needed. I’ve decided to commit for this kind of project-based challenge instead of the traditional 30 Inktober-style drawings, as I have a very exciting collaborative project I’ve been wanting to get off the ground for a long time now. I constantly keep putting it off, producing little more than sketches, always lacking confidence in my skills and thinking I need to improve and learn more before I can make any kind of real start on it.
Enough is enough. I definitely have some issues with large projects that I need to work out. But I’m confident that taking this kind of action will help me with them, much like Inktober helped me get over my uncertainties around ink. I need a healthier relationship with my art, and with the act of drawing itself. I need to get over this fear of working on large projects.
Ultimately, my absence from blogging for so many years comes from the same place – overinflating the importance and the workload of restarting the blog, growing the task in my mind until it becomes this towering, immovable boulder that I have no possible hope of lifting. But in reality blogging, like so many things, is a big pile of small rocks that you can easily move one at a time. Just like a comic is a long series of small drawings that you can tackle one by one.
So I’ve signed the pledge, posted to my blog and social media to make it official, and for the next 100 days I will be working on a COOL NEW SECRET PROJECT. I intend to launch it very soon, and then continue working on related content for at least one hour a day for the next three months to get the ball rolling.
Keep your eyes peeled for updates! They won’t be daily, but rest assured there will be plenty going on behind the scenes 😉
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If you want to find out more about the 100 Day challenge, check out Mitch’s video explanation at www.100DayArtist.com. There’s no set time limit, and no set scope – you can use it for whatever you want (learning how to cook healthy food, building an exercise routine, recording songs on your ocarina), and you can start your challenge whenever you like. Maybe today? If you do, be sure to leave a comment below or tag me on social media.
Mitch’s Youtube channel 3 also contains some amazing advice and is well worth subscribing to if you are an artist that struggles with working on larger projects, on taking your art to the next level, on really getting serious and making the things you want to make. He posts new content regularly, and there are some original and powerful ideas in there. Strongly recommended.
Mitch Bowler’s Youtube channel – complete with clickbait thumbnails! He’s learning so fast.
- Just as an aside, two excellent books on the subject: Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles & Ted Orland, and The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It’s a topic close to my heart, and not in a good way. You can buy Art and Fear and The War of Art by following these affiliate links if you’d like to help out the site a little.
- Pencil Kings – a private, paid forum for artists. I was a member for a number of months, and learned a fair bit, but ultimately did not find quite the kind of community I was looking for. I have considered going back, as there are some great opportunities for structured learning in there.
- https://www.youtube.com/user/PencilKingsTube
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