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Most of you are familiar with Inktober or Mermay, two of the most popular drawing challenges on the internet. Inktober was created by Jake Parker, and every October 1st he publishes a list of 31 prompts to be done fully in some form of ink. Some people opt for ballpoint pen doodles, some will do calligraphy, some do digital inking (I raise my hand here) and some do fully rendered ink pieces in crosshatch or stipple. There aren't a ton of restrictions, as long as you follow the prompt list and use ink. Mermay is pretty self-explanatory; it was created by Tom Bancroft, and every May he publishes a list of prompts for people to make into mermaids... you get the drift. Of course, these are all 31-day challenges, but I like to condense into 30 so that my Instagram feed (which is grouped in 3s) will look good after completing it! Ah, millennials.
I've done Inktober before, and I did fine, but I was a junior in college so I was very busy--most of my pieces were very quick. But at least I stuck with it! I know I mention Jake Parker a lot, but his mantra is "finished, not perfect", and I hang on to that mantra like a koala. Jake always says that it's more important to actually finish something rather than make it perfect. As artists, we tend to get caught up in making something look perfect. We'll sit there and tweak little things for years sometimes, and we tend to think as Da Vinci did -- "art is never finished, only abandoned".
I would stand to disagree.
Sure, no art piece is truly perfect. But you have to let go of something eventually, or you'll be stuck on the same thing forever. This could apply to probably anything else. If you get hung up on past hurts or stay basking in nostalgia forever, you won't move forward. The past is an interesting place. It should be visited, but should never become a place of residence. Similarly, you can't keep tweaking the same piece forever, or keep writing the same manuscript forever. You have to eventually take the plunge to finish it, or at least move to the next step.
MY PERSONAL 30-DAY CHALLENGE
This past March, I created my own personal challenge -- 30 Fictional Women. It's a little more rigid than Inktober or Mermay are. I decided that for 30 days in March (which coincided with Women's Month), I would do a full-color, full-background illustration of 30 fictional female characters. I sat down and preplanned the characters I would draw, and I just... well, I just DID it. I'll be honest -- I wasn't overly pleased with most of them. They weren't BAD, per se. They were just fairly average. But there were some gems that I really was proud of!
My main takeaways from the challenge were:
1) Drawing different ethnicities/clothing styles.
Since I'm (mostly) white (the rest of me is Asian), I typically draw white people -- which isn't inherently a bad thing, there are a lot of white people in this world. I've learned to make my white characters more diverse. But I also realized how little representation there was for other cultures and ethnicities, which is a bummer because I've had the privilege to live in multiple cultures! One of my favorite outfits to draw was Ziio's. I didn't do her design justice, but the work the Assassin's Creed team put into designing Ziio and all the other ethnically/culturally diverse characters in AC3. I think anyone would stand to admit that other cultures have some gorgeous things to share. I had to shift my mindset away from my own characters; I had to make these women accurate, especially to the medium that I took them from (whether comics, movies, books, etc.), and I had to learn to tag my posts correctly so others would see them. (I also realized that I have a thing for Star Wars characters... but that's more of a personal realization than an artistic one.)
2) Varying the poses and perspective.
I used to love drawing dynamic poses, but when I started college I got more into fine-art type subjects. People sitting still, portraits, standing, what-have-you. I initially wanted to become a comic book artist in high school, so I'd spent a lot of time drawing dynamic, moving figures. Did I do a perfect job? Absolutely the heck not. A lot of my pieces are very still and head-on -- which isn't inherently bad! I wanted to showcase the character and make her the center of attention. But people can only stand a couple different ways before it gets stale, you know?
3) Placing them in recognizable, sensible backgrounds.
Sometimes the backgrounds were no-brainers, and other times I was scratching my head, thinking, "What am I going to draw..." I personally hate painting backgrounds -- all my characters seem to live in the void -- but the challenge was a great way to face that fear head-on. What are "trees"? What is "perspective"? If it's not people I usually don't want to draw it. But I HAD to, so, you know. I did.
YOUR PERSONAL 30-DAY CHALLENGE
I could ramble on for hours about how much I learned from the challenge! But I'm not here to overanalyze my own challenge, I'm here to encourage you to do your own. Now I'm not saying you have to do exactly what I did and preplan a bunch of characters and do a full illustration every day. I just got lucky that the entire country got put in lockdown to make me sit down and just FINISH it. Trust me, it got super tedious after a while, especially on the days where I just wasn't happy with my drawing. But I did it anyway.
Taking thirty days to do a challenge of any kind is enough to teach you quite a bit. It's been said that it takes 21 days to make a habit, though I don't know how accurate that might necessarily be. Regardless, you're bound to learn a couple of things if you just sit down every day for a month and do that routine. You could say that you'll spend thirty days drawing a sheep in thirty different ways. You could do a logo a day, or a sketchy portrait a day, or a gesture a day. It doesn't have to be massive. It just has to be achievable, and you have to want to achieve it.
Here's my advice on creating your own 30-day challenge:
1) Make it something you're passionate about.
I LOVE drawing people. And I hadn't done much intentional portfolio-building since I graduated. I knew that I wanted to specialize in character art, so I thought "what better way to do that than draw characters people already know and love?" Additionally, drawing well-established characters in popular works of fiction was a good way to build my social media following a bit... guess who I got that from?
These thirty-day challenges aren't just applicable to "traditional" art forms, or even art itself. You could sew something small, or create a pair of earrings, or do cardio, every day. I know cardio is a weird thing to put on that list, but you need to take care of yourself physically too, and I know I could use more exercise. I'm about as active as a slug.
2) Make it something achievable.
I'm not in school right now, nor am I in full-time work. And with the quarantines, I've been stuck at home a lot. These conditions gave me a lot of free time to sit down and do full illustrations. Depending on your schedule, you might not have a ton of free time. If you need to, make it smaller. Draw on a post-it note every day, or draw one facial expression every day. Whatever it is, make it something you can realistically accomplish; that way, you won't feel as overwhelmed by the amount of work you've dished out for yourself.
3) Intentionally want to achieve it.
You can have the best intentions, but the most important thing you need to do is sit down and DO it. It's an elementary concept, and yet... I don't want to sit down and do it. But having structure is vital to complete these sorts of things. Life is full of deadlines that don't care about your feelings, so sit your butt down and DO it. Set alarms. Stay awake later if you have to. Of course, I'm not saying you SHOULD deprive yourself of sleep... but sometimes the annoyance of staying awake to finish something might make you finish it earlier in the day. I know it did for me...
If nothing else, take the challenge to be intentionally kind, or to reach out to someone.
You never know what a thirty-day habit might do for you.