30 Days Drawing Together: Pre-challenge
Tips & tricks for a fun AND productive daily drawing challenge!
Hi friends! The kick-off for our 30 Days Drawing Together challenge approaches (psst,it’s next Tuesday, October 15th – subscribe below if you wanna join!). So I’m popping in to share some of my tips for a fun and productive time. 😁
1. It’s all about PLAY.
Cultivating play in our practice is one of the best, most fun ways to achieve a sense of fulfilment and exercise creativity. If we are like hamsters in a wheel churning out projects on crazy deadlines, the lack of room to play, experiment and reflect makes us resort to the same solutions to everything. So we don’t allow ourselves the time to try new things and make mistakes, and that is precisely when the magic happens.
Another limiting belief I’ve dealt with is that whatever I post on my Instagram has to look a certain way, as in super-cohesive with my Big Official Illustration Portfolio. That is called perfectionism, and it’s a paralysing little bugger. Another version of this is trying to please The Algorithm to get more likes and engagement = an external form of validation that ultimately is not truly fulfilling.
The solution? Follow your intuition. The more I let loose the ideas that want to come through me, the more discoveries I make, and the more authentic the work is. As a consequence, opportunities inevitably come by, like art directors often asking me to work on something based on those experiments!
2. Play thrives within structure.
For the magic of play to unfold, as a squiggly brained creative prone to procrastination and perfectionism, I’ve noticed that I need structure, ie. a set of parameters to work within.
Those can be:
Schedule the time to do it. I have an 8 month old baby who sometimes does 2 hour-long naps around midday, and sometimes doesn’t. So I make damn sure that in the first 30 mins of that nap I get some sketching and drawing done! Within that, I’m also making sure things stay flexible and realistic with my time and energy, so for example on some weekends I am not making and sharing drawings.
Set rules & limitations. Will you use a specific tool? Specific shapes? A specific colour palette? Will it be set in, or inspired by, a specific moment in time? The more constraints and limitations, the more unique it will be. In my case, I am working within a specific colour palette and either from Procreate or Adobe Illustrator. I usually have a few themes I return to, like lettering, isometric explorations, portraits, landscapes, etc. For this challenge, we will have a list of prompts to help spark ideas.
Choose a format. What form will the project take, and where will it live? Will it be digital drawings shared on your Instagram account, a series of paintings, a physical sketchbook?
If you fall off the horse? Don’t over-think it, just jump right back on whenever you can! The important thing is to give yourself grace for doing your best and to keep moving.
I hope this helps and I’m so excited to kick off as a community next week!
Stay tuned for the challenge Chat thread I’ll open here on Substack for subscribers, where I’ll share the list of suggested prompts, and where we can start sharing and chatting about our process.