Art challenges all year long - commit, grow, share!

1. Introduction: Hi. If you're anything like me, you love doing art, but sometimes it's hard to know what to draw, what to paint, maybe even what to write. In this course, we're gonna go through art challenges you can do all year long to keep your skills sharp and to keep yourself focused. What's in this class? Well first we're going to talk about the different types of art challenges and how to do them. They are a yearly challenges, monthly challenges, even just weekly challenges where you're trying to make as much art as you can. We're going to talk about social media and how they can fit in with your art challenges. Finally, we're going to go through a set of monthly art challenges for every month. I'm gonna give you links, goals, and ideas for how to succeed at them. My goal in this course is to get you making great art. And that's what I want you to keep in mind while you're watching the whole course and while you're doing your projects, there are a lot of challenges out there. And if you go to Google and search for art challenges or yearly art challenges, you might be overwhelmed for the results. For that reason, I'm going to stick to two to three per category that I think are the best ones for people who are just looking to make some great art. I don't want to overwhelm you, but I do want to encourage you to go out and see code your own. If you feel as though the ones in this course aren't something that will fit for you. In the class project. You're going to choose at least one challenge to try and do it. I want to see everything you're doing and I would love to see you post it to the class project page and the discussions for extra points. Try to do one challenge per month or tried to commit to a whole year's worth of our challenges. I'll see you in the next lesson what we're talking about, how to succeed at these challenges. 2. General information about art challenges: Before we jump in and start talking about these specific challenges that we're gonna be talking about throughout the course. Let's talk a little bit about how to do art challenges in general, if you've never done one before or if you're curious about how other people do them. This is a great video to watch before you get started. If you've never done an art challenge before, well, think about them as self-paced and low stress. They're supposed to be fun. If you treat your art challenge like it's something that is very stressful or that you have to finish or that you have hanging over your head every single day and every single time you start sitting down to do art, maybe you need to give yourself a little bit more slack. Usually aren't. Challenges are time-bound, which means that you're going to start at a particular day, typically the first of the month, and end at another day normally the end of the month. That gives you a really nice time window that you can focus your artistic creativity in without having to worry about when you start and keeping yourself on track. Some of them though they do go throughout the entire year and a lot of them we're gonna be talking about today that go through the year, either weekly or daily challenges. So depending on how much you want to commit, you can choose to do a monthly or weekly or a daily challenge. Some of them, however, our output bound. So as an example, you might see our challenge is to say draw 100 faces in the month of February. I'm not going to be focusing too much on those challenges because this is really about putting your calendar together for your art challenges. And that's what we're gonna be focusing on in this course. Alright, Now what about materials? While some of the art challenges do require very specific materials, and generally speaking, if you're going to do that challenge, you typically want to commit to using that material. As an example, in October uses ink. If you're not using ink during October, then probably you should find another challenge to do in October. And there are many other challenges, however, do let you decide. Many of them are very open. Some of them involve things like writing or videos or whatever it is that happens to entertain you out the time. You can also add extra to the challenges to our self. So as an example, if you'd like October, but maybe you want to also do some watercolor. Maybe you're gonna be doing pen and ink with a watercolor wash. Philosophies of materials. So some people have different ways of thinking about how to do an art challenge. People tend to take art challenges either extremely seriously and follow the rules or they decide to customize them for themselves. So different philosophies as an example, somebody might say, I want to stick to a single medium all a year. If you're gonna do that, then you're going to choose the art challenges that allow you to express yourself and to follow along in that medium. The other hand, you might say something like, I want to explore a new medium every month. Or maybe you don't want to be stuck to a medium. Maybe you want to get better at pencils and then maybe acrylic. Maybe you don't really care about the medium. You want the subject to choose the medium for you. So maybe you love drawing butterflies using watercolor, but you'd like painting figures. If that's you. If you're the kind of person who wants to just explore and many different mediums, then let that happen. It's perfectly okay to use the prompt list from one art challenge to work in some other medium. Even if that our challenge isn't really work with that. As an example, maybe you don't love using pen and ink, but you're really liked the ink Tolbert prompts. Well, what you're gonna do is pick the mini me like it's supposed to be low stress and fun. My personal philosophy when I'm doing an art challenge, I tend to think a lot about how the challenge is asking me to be creative. So as an example, if the challenge requires particular medium and I've chosen to do that, I will tend to follow those rules, especially for things like ink Toba. If I'm doing October, I will be using ink. If I'm doing nano Rameau, I will be writing typically in a Word document. But otherwise, I'm just going to choose whichever medium I feel like using. I'm very much the kind of person to explore different mediums. And halfway through the year, I'll go and buy a whole new set of something and see what I can do with it. And that's really what keeps me going in my creative journey. And so what I'm going to do is let the subjects choose the medium for me. There are some general tips for success that I would like to share with you before you get started on your art journey for these art challenges. The first one is it is best to plan ahead. So a lot of the times I will search social media or other internet websites looking for art challenges to do in the next month. Normally I sort of get the bug for a art challenge somewhere in the middle of a month where my practice is stuttering a little bit. I don't know what to do and so I'm thinking, well I need an art challenge, so I'm gonna go and find one. But it is always best to plan ahead. Usually what you don't want to do is on the first of the month, start typing into Google what our challenges are for this month. Although if that's how you work, then that's how you work and go ahead and do it. Then you should be deciding how you're going to do it. A lot of art challenges have specific rules and you can make that decision. No one is sitting there and making sure you follow the rules. It's all up to you. But are you going to follow every single rule? Are you going to do the rules when you feel like it? Are you going to only do half the challenge, you're a quarter, that's another option as well. If e.g. you are halfway through the month and you don't really want to wait for the next month and you loved this art challenge. We'll go ahead and do it. Why not start halfway through? The other thing is if you don't have a lot of time. So I recommend setting time aside and making an appointment with yourself to do your art challenge every day or every week or however it is you're going to do it. But if the art challenges, like a daily art challenge where you're supposed to be doing one thing every day. You simply don't have that time. It is perfectly okay to only use every other prompt. There's nothing stopping you. So think of it as a low stress way to explore your creativity. But that's a really good tip for success is to make an appointment with yourself so that you also are committing to it for yourself. You're going to see throughout the entire class, I'm going to be recommending a social media hashtags you can use for your art challenges. And a question you might have is, well, hang on a second. I don't want to share my stuff on Instagram or Reddit or whatever it is. No, you do not have to use your socials. However, a lot of art challenges. In fact, every art challenge and I'm going to show you in this class, has hashtags associated with them. And what these do is it makes it really easy to get inspired. So if you're scrolling through Instagram and you type in the hashtag for that particular challenge, you're going to see everyone who's working on that challenge. It's gonna be a little bit fun for you. It also makes it easier to connect with the communities and to get some views. So if someone is looking for October and you're posting a lot doing Tolbert than people are going to notice you and you're also going to be able to share and experience them. However, this is not necessary at all. Remember, there's no real rules to art challenges. These are something we take on ourselves. And although we like to follow the structure of an art challenge, we don't have to follow the structure of an art challenge. And so if you don't want to use your socialists, don't. I personally only very vaguely use my socials only when I really remember to do it. In October is a particular month for me when I do try to focus on using my socials and getting my workout there. But otherwise, when I'm ever I'm doing art challenge, I typically do it only for myself and I normally don't use my socials. You do? Well, you need to do. So how do you best use this class? Well, the first thing is you can watch it end-to-end if you want. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. And I really encourage you to, if you haven't really taken on too many art challenges where you're not entirely sure how they work, then go ahead and look at all of them. On the other hand, if you have a part of the year that you really want to do a challenge for e.g. if you're watching this in December and you're really ready to be a new creative you in January, then maybe only focus on that part of the course and look at some ideas there. Then keep on coming back for more. Once you've done your January are challenged. Maybe you want to do a February our challenge, and maybe you don't want to do one in February, you want to do one in may? Well, go ahead and come on back and learn about the art challenges I suggest. Now these challenges that I'm suggesting to you are really just that they're just suggested challenges. You can find your own, you can make your own. You can have a ton of fun doing these art challenges. Remember the reason you're watching this class is to help you to focus your creative journey. It's not to follow every single one of the art challenges that I suggest. Rather it's to get some ideas for how you can best focus on what you're doing. So with no further ado, let's start jumping in and learning about different art challenges, starting with yearly challenges. 3. Yeear long challenges: Alright, so we're talking now about some year long art challenges. And the year-long art challenges, I think are really interesting because they're going to give you something to focus on for a very long period of time. So why should you do a year-long art challenge? It's a pretty daunting thing to do. Well, first of all, it gives you a huge focus. So it's for the entire year. And you're going to be looking at this art challenge as something to make yourself improve. Generally speaking, when you're choosing to do a year-long art challenge, you have a specific goal in mind. These are challenges that although of course you can only do maybe one a week or whatever it is if it's a daily art challenge, normally you're going to commit to for the whole year because you want to achieve that big, big project. Now usually for most of the early art challenges that I have seen, except for a couple of you don't have to start right on January 1st. And the reason for that is because most people find out about your lung art challenges probably somewhere in the middle of the year. And so it'd be really unfortunate if you have to wait a whole year to get started now, some of them do, we're gonna look at October 52 and you're going to see that this one does in fact require you to suggest anyway, not required, but it's gonna suggest that you start in somewhere in January, but most of them are not going to be quite so strict. Alright, but why should you not do a year-long art challenge? Well, what if you don't feel like committing that much focused? I personally have had difficulty sticking to a year-long art challenge because generally I like to jump around and really explore different things. And so if I'm committing to say, making a drawing per day using only pencil for 365 days. I know it's going to make me better, but it's not something that I can necessarily commit to every single day. It's also not for you if you're not sure if you can devote that much time to what you're doing. So if you don't think that you can really put aside one maybe hour, maybe half an hour every single day of your life for a whole year, then maybe a yearly art challenge is not for you. But if you've decided to do a yearly art challenge, how do you succeed at it? And so here is my recommendations to you. First of all, keep in mind they are very, very big challenges, which means you should be setting some realistic goals for yourself. Maybe if it's a drawing per day challenge, maybe that's not something that's exactly for you, but maybe you want to scale it. So interesting ways of scaling it. If you have a large prompt list one per day, then maybe you can take all of the prompts for the one week and put them into a drawing instead. So you're doing instead 52 drawings instead of 365. On the other hand, maybe you're just going to keep referring back to the prompt list and when something really gets you going, that's what you're gonna be working on. Scale it how you like. Remember, you should never dread the art challenges you're doing this for yourself. They're designed to get you doing your art. Alright, but let's take a look at some of them. So one of the more famous ones is called ink October of 52. And we're gonna see ink to overcome up in October because that was what it was originally designed for. But inked over 50 to the timing is then one prompt per week. So you're going to get a prompt every week and it's on the October website you can see down there. And the restrictions for October 52 is that you must be using ink in some way. Now, the interesting thing about October is that you do not need to use exclusively ink but in Casta feature. And so the idea goes, maybe you do an underlying pencil sketch. I do that very frequently when I do my inked over stuff. But maybe also you want to introduce things like a washes of watercolor, and that's perfectly acceptable as long as ink focuses strongly. The goal is to complete one ink based art per worker, per week based around the prompt. And so this gives you a lot more time to focus on your artwork then in October itself, which is one per day, on your socials, you should be using the hashtag ink tuber, or inked over 52. And what is really fantastic for is focusing on one medium without trying to yourself every single day. So it's a really good medium pen and ink because a lot of fun in congenital is a lot of fun. And it's something that allows you to focus. And there's the website there. Another interesting one is called Kick 365. And so this is a more unstructured way. There aren't really too many prompts around for this one. This one says every single day, for 365 days, for one whole year starting any time. So you don't need to start on January 1st. It doesn't matter. There's no real prompt list, so you can go ahead and do what you need to do. You can use any medium you like. However, the goal is to make sketches. And so whatever sketches means to you, you're going to be doing one sketch per day. And this could be a charcoal sketch. It could be changing different mediums. It doesn't really matter. Socialists using kick 365, the hashtag and the goal is to get yourself drawing without worrying about following prompts. So you're going to find that if you're doing a kick 365, you will have a little bit of difficulty coming up with ideas every day, especially somewhere halfway through the year. And so I recommend while you're on the buster driving to work or doing the dishes, start thinking about what you're gonna be doing for the next day. There's the website right there. And just if you're wondering, kicking the creatives.com is a fantastic website for exactly these things. They have tons of art challenges and we're actually going to see them coming up quite a bit. For people who are a little more into fine art. Ian Roberts, who is a painter, is a fantastic author and YouTuber as well. And his focus is specifically on composition and shapes in art. So Ian Roberts talks about something called the composition per day. And the idea is that for every single day, 365 days of the year starting at anytime. So it's not a particular challenge is just you decide to start today and so you're going to do it. The medium is technically anything you like. But Roberts himself recommends using pencil and paper, so he is a painter. But the reason he recommends pencil and paper is because this composition per day challenge is to get you thinking very hard about interesting shapes, bold contrast, and excellent composition, and specifically drawing from life if you can. So the goal with this is to get better at thinking about composition. So we're going to take away things like color and paint mixing and everything else. There aren't really any socials for this one. In fact, it comes from a book. It does not come from online. From an excellent book called Mastering composition by Ian Roberts. It's available at many, many libraries and you can also buy it on Amazon. I recommend reading the book because it is fantastic, but this is something really if you want to take your composition and life drawing skills to the next level. Now, interestingly enough for this one, Ian Roberts suggests spending 20-30 min on your compositions everyday and generally making them small enough to be able to finish within that time. So you really aren't challenges are a giant, giant commitment, but they are going to make you level up so much, you have no idea. But let's talk about something a little more manageable. Next, let's start talking about some monthly our challenges. 4. Monthly challenges, January to March: Alright, now we're going to start talking about monthly art challenges. So if you find the idea of a yearly art challenge a little bit too much, then we're going to start talking about these monthly art challenges. So if you're wondering how this is going to go in this video, we're going to talk about January to March, but also the general philosophy of doing a monthly art challenge. And then in subsequent videos we're going to break the year up into quarters so that you don't have to watch 30-minute video and seek through the month you want. Alright, but let's talk about January to March. But before we do that, let's talk about art challenges in general and how does succeed at monthly art challenges. So let's take a look at them. So why would you do them? Well, the first thing is that they are sorted term and easier to commit to, especially compared to a year-long art challenge. So a year-long art challenge is a big commitment and really good for leveling up your skills. A monthly art challenge is a shorter commitment that lets you explore your creativity a little bit. It lets you change things up every single month. And so you can start focusing one month on writing, the next month on painting, and the next month maybe on digital and 3D art work. Who knows, That's up to you. It's really great if you're like me and you tend to get bored doing one thing all the time. And so if you want to focus on different things and you want to start growing in different ways monthly. Our challenges are fantastic for you. Alright, but why would you not want to do monthly art challenge? Well, if you really want to commit to getting better at one thing. So if you want to commit to getting better at composition, then Ian Roberts, 365 days of composition is probably the best thing you can do. The other hand, if you do prefer to stick to one idea for a very long time, perhaps you really want to work on your sketching for 365 days. Well, that is fine. If you don't want to do the short-term constantly switching thing, then don't do this short-term constantly switching thing. How do you do these monthly art challenges? Well, the first thing I recommend you do is doing a bit of research before the month begins. If you found an art challenge that really speaks to you, say it's the middle of January and you wanna do this starting in February, then it's a good idea to start looking at the rules of the art challenge. How do you share your work for this art challenge and what has been done before? Maybe you want to go back to the previous prompt plus and the previous artwork that's already been done. And you want to see what people have already done. The reason you want to do this as first of all, it can get you excited for things. You're going to think about the art and you're going to think about the challenge, but also so that you're not blind-sided. Maybe on the first day of the month, minuss says, Oh, by the way, you're supposed to be using watercolor for this and you decided to follow all the rules, but you don't have any watercolors with you. I also recommend you do a little bit of planning. So what are your goals? Are you going to follow the rules strictly? Are you going to do maybe it's a one drawing per day. Are you going to do that every single day or on the other hand, are you going to do something different where you want to scale it or add different things are changed. The media, what are you going to do? The question you have to answer is, what do I want to get out of this art challenge? And then you're going to start structuring your time and structuring your work around the answers to that question. Remember, I'm going to say this a bunch more times. There's no reason to worry about this. It shouldn't be dreadful for you. You're doing it for fun. So if you see an art challenge, it's amazing because maybe you really like mermaids and there's a mermaid that you're really wanna do. You don't want to do one every day, then don't write. But being clear, when you go into the art challenge before you start, it is going to help you to understand your own goals and what you're going to do. The other thing I want to mention is you do not have to do one of these every month. You can if you want, of course. But maybe you just want to choose January's are challenged because it's a new year and you have all these cool new art mediums, you want to play with it, and then you just wanted to go out and your own. That's fine. I'm not expecting you to do every single one. So speaking of which, let's talk about some January art challenges. We're going to start the year, right? By choosing ourselves an art challenge that really speaks to us. So the first one I'm going to recommend is Creature January. January is a creature design month all throughout January. And the idea is you get one prompt per day, every single day in January. And the medium is completely open. There's no one's stopping you from doing whatever you want. You can switch it up halfway through. You can focus on one medium. You can focus on two or three mediums, whatever it is you want to do. The goal though, is to create one creature illustration every single day in January. So you're going to maybe make your monsters, maybe make some dragons. It doesn't matter whatever the word creature means to you. That's what you're going to do. If you want to share it on socials, you're going to be using the hashtag creature January. And it is really fantastic for focusing on creativity. So letting your imagination go, If you don't worry about, do I have the ears positioned exactly right? Well, it's a creature who cares. It's something that entirely in your imagination. And this is something where if you've got a bunch of new art supplies, are just really willing to start the year off, right? This is a fantastic art challenge for you because you can really play in it. The official Instagram account for it as instagram.com slash creature January. And I recommend you check that out first so that you can see what other people have done. Tinker sketches, the next one that I recommend, and it is something that's going to come up again. Take your sketches fantastic because how they do it is there's one prompt per day and then generally they're going to break their prompts up into months. And so I'm going to mention this twice actually. And in January, the reason I recommend doing Tinker sketch in January if you're still looking for stuff to do, is because that January 1st has something in our minds. It says it's a new year and I can do new things. And tinker sketch is extremely low stress. It basically says, do whatever you want, make a sketch every day, and that's it. There are prompts available if you go to Tinker lab.com slash January art challenge, you're going to see some prompts that they suggest you can use. But realistically, the whole point of tinker sketch is to reset your art and your creativity by doing one sketch per day. Socials are hashtag tinker sketch, and it is a fantastic low stress way to start the year and just play around. One that I particularly like is something called the January art journal. So this is where every single day you're going to be creating an illustrated journal page that represents what you did. Prompts are available, but they're optional because generally speaking, this January art journal idea is that you're going to go out and experience your own life and then come back and reflect on that. And that's what it's really great for. It's great for reflecting, remembering and starting the year in a way that you can look back and say This is where I was creatively back at that time. You can use socials if you so desire, but a lot of people don't really want to share this because it is a journal of your own personal thoughts. But if you want to, you can share it with the hashtag art journal January. And if you take a look at kicking the creatives.com slash article, journal January, you can see that they do in fact have a Facebook group where you can join it and start talking to people who are on the same journey as you. Alright, so we're coming out of January and we've done our creative journaling or whatever we've chosen. Now it's time to take a look at some really focused art challenges in February that are going to help you to move on in your creative practice. One of the ones that I will be doing every single year is called February. And the idea behind February is that you do one per day throughout February. You can use any medium you like, switch it up personally, I'm going to be using traditional media only for this. And the goal is to create one piece of art featuring the human figure every single day. There are some socials you can use. So figure very hashtag February or hashtag figure drawing month. And this actually comes from a YouTube channel now, an art company and someone who has some really fantastic tutorials and a really great community called love life drawing. And the idea behind their socials is that they're trying to get people to learn, to draw from life and to be comfortable drawing from life and then to become exceptional figure drawers and exceptional drugs. So the human body, It's really fantastic for focusing on drawing skills. This is really a drawing challenge. And normally of course you can use whatever medium you want, but the recommendations are to use things like charcoal or pencil. You can get started by looking at past February's at loved life drawing.com slash February. If you're not so into doing those art challenges and you want something that's a little bit more fun than you can use. Fair airy fairy area is one per day throat, February. And this one here is a really open art challenge. You can do anything you want. There is absolutely no restrictions. Some people actually prefer to write instead of creating visual art. Some people like to make animations, whatever lets you get your animation and ideas flowing. The goal is to create one piece of art featuring a ferry every single day in February and you socials are going to be hashtag, very area. This is fantastic if you want focus creativity, if you really love drawing fairies and fantasy worlds and to start working on making pretty things. Or if you want to totally turn that around, maybe you want to make some scary fairies. The brush warriors website is another fantastic resource for art challenges. And you're going to find the ideas behind Ferry area at brush warriors.com slash very airy art challenge. Marked as an interesting month if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, it's just the beginning of spring. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, it's just the beginnings of fall. And so this is a magical month for all of us around the world to start experiencing different levels of magic in our art. Which of course brings us to magical March. Symmetrical March is one day or one per day throughout the entire month of March. Anything you like you can do whatever it is you want, doesn't really matter. There's no restrictions on your medium. You create one piece of art and they recommend you feature a magical girl every single day. Now you don't have to do, of course, you can just do one piece of art focused around the idea of magic. There are some prompts that do exist and it was created by someone who now maintains the official Instagram account for it. So it's instagram.com slash reality artwork. And it is fantastic for focus creativity, but also for character design. So if you're super into character design, you want to start focusing that and seeing what you can do with a single idea. This whole idea behind magic and magical girl than magical March is fantastic for you. The March of robots is something that's also interesting. And if you are not super keen on doing fantasy, but you really want to do something more techno. Then March of robots is a fantastic one for you to do. And it is again one per day throughout March. And the medium is anything you'd like now Marta robots is particularly popular among 3D artists because robots are very technological and a lot of people enjoy making them in a, in a world that is 3D and fully realized. The goal is to create one piece of art featuring a robot every single day in March, prompts are available, but they are optional. So if you don't want to be restricted in what kind of things you're doing and you want to basically figure yourself out on your own. Don't worry too much about what the prompt list says. Socials there is March of robots, but also March of robots 2020, whatever. So if you're doing March of robots 2023, you would do hashtag March of robots 2023. It is fantastic for focus, creativity and character design. And if you really want to push yourself, if you're a traditional artists, it's fantastic for tying a digital media because it's just something that resonates with that medium. If you're working on robots than making digital media robots is just something that makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, if you want to completely flip that narrative on his head, maybe you're normally digital artists making some extremely traditional. Maybe an oil painting of a robot would be a lot of fun as well. The website there is chocolate soup studio.com slash marks of robots and they are the original curators. So we've talked about monthly art challenges and we've started our journey on monthly our challenges from January to March. The next video we're going to talk about April to June and moving forward in the year. 5. April to June: April to June art challenges are in North America anyway, in the Northern Hemisphere, where you start thinking a lot about the summer and the spring. If you're in the southern hemisphere, then you're starting to think about the winter and the fall. For that reason because we're talking about transition periods between either summer and fall depending on where in the world you live. We're going to start talking about pushing ourselves in April. So I recommend you choose one of the art challenges that really makes you stretch yourself and your creativity. The first one I recommend is called Inky April and inky April is very similar to October. However, there's a twist. Once per day you're going to be doing a drawing. There are prompts that are available, but they're optional, but you are only allowed to use ink. I want to make it clear what this means. When I say you're only allowed to use ink, I mean you're only allowed to use ink. It's a fascinating art challenge. You can't do a pencil sketch, nothing. You're going to be starting with ink and you're going to be ending with ink. So why would you ever do it? Well, the idea is to build confidence in your drawings. Ink cannot be erased. So once the mark is down, it's down. And if you're starting to do some ink gathered drawings or paintings, depending on how you use your ink, then you're going to be forced to say, I want this mark right here because once it's down, it's not going anywhere. Staying there. This is another one from kicking the creatives and kicking the creatives.com slash ink April drawing challenge using the socialists inky April. Kicking the creatives has another one called abstract art April. So this one, if you're a little bit intimidated by the idea of using ink than maybe you want to do one per day throughout April of an abstract painting. The goal here is specifically to use the medium of painting. It could be oil paint, watercolor, acrylic, gouache. It doesn't really matter as long as it is, in fact paint. The goal is to create one piece of abstract art using paint every single day. And this is really fantastic for focusing on composition. So one of the most misunderstood parts of abstract art is this idea that it's a bunch of random marks on the page. And that could not be further from the truth. Abstract art works because composition works. And so abstract art is all about shapes and interesting colors and interesting ways of organizing things on your medium. So when you're thinking about abstract April, think really about composition, trying out new techniques with paint and everything else that you may not have thought of before. It is another one from kicking the creatives, kicking the creatives.com slash abstract art April and the socials are abstract art April. Once you've gone through April and you've really focused on technique, I think it's time to start thinking about new beginnings and pretty things. So for that reason, I'm going to introduce you to mermaid. So for anyone who loves mermaids or fantasy creatures in general, mermaid is a lot of fun. The mediums through this one are totally open. Digital is great here and a lot of people work on mermaid using digital media exclusively because it's a little bit faster for them and they're typically used to it now I personally, if I'm ever going to be doing where maybe we'll use probably watercolor or alcohol ink markers. I just like working traditionally, but you do what you need to do. The idea is to create one mermaid drawing every single day in the socials is hashtag Merman. And what this is really fantastic for personally, I feel you can use it for exploring colors, creature design, and then also some techniques with the medium you've chosen. You don't need to stick to one medium, but I think that it would be interesting to choose one and go with it for the whole month. The website is mermaid.com. Another really fascinating one from May is called miniature man. So this is not so much painting miniature figures, but it is working on miniature art. So once per day again, throughout the entire month of May, you can use whatever medium you want. But I recommend against using digital media for this one, because you can zoom in as much as you want in digital media. And so the whole point of this challenge is to create a small artwork using maybe small brushes or a small pencils or whatever it happens to be. And the idea is to focus on working small and then simplification when you're working in a five-by-five piece or smaller, you simply cannot put in as much detail as you could if you're working on a giant canvas or a giant piece of paper or a giant piece of digital art. Socialist share it with hashtag miniature May and it's another one from taking the creatives.com kicking the creatives.com slash miniature may art challenge in June this time to have a little bit of fun. So June is all about monsters. The first one we're going to recommend is chi June. So there are a large monsters typically popular in Japanese media. You might think about Godzilla and Mathura are a giant tube. You want to have one per day throughout all of June, it is totally open, but this particular challenge is very popular among digital artists. And the goal is to create one side. You are giant monster every single day the prompts do exist, but they're optional. If you want to really focus on your creativity and making epic scenes with these giant hundred foot tall monsters are even bigger. Walking through a city. This is a fantastic our challenge for you. It is great for your creativity as well. Flank Cortes is the most popular prompt maker and arguably is the creator of chi June. And you can find the Instagram account, instagram.com slash plan Cortes and share with socials hashtag MCI, June, the June Bug art challenges to me, bugs are monsters. And I think it would be a very interesting art challenge if you are not the biggest fan of creepy crawly. So this is one per day again throughout June. So these are really all daily art challenges. The mediums are totally open. And my recommendation for you is if you want to have a lot of fun with this, maybe focus on this one as illustrations. So you're going to work on maybe scientific illustration or something stylized. The goal is to create one piece of art per day centered around insects or bugs. Prompts are optional so you can look for a prompt list if you wish, or you can just choose a new insect, socialist hashtag, June Bug challenge. And this is great for focusing on an often overlooked subject. I personally don't draw or paint too many bugs. I think I've done it a couple of times and I've always got freaked out by looking at my references. And so it's time to start looking at something that challenges me. The website is brush warriors.com. So that's June Bug art challenge and that's a great place to start. So now it's time to start thinking about moving on. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere and moving on into the heart of summer. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, we're talking about the heart of winter. So July through September. 6. July to September: July through September is a time where if we've really been focusing on these art challenges for the entire year, than maybe it is time to start thinking about different themes. In July, the biggest one probably is world watercolor month or so, but we're going to talk about first world watercolor month is an interesting movement that is in existence since 2016, 2017. And it is one per day throughout the entire month of July, with the mediums specifically being watercolor. So hence his world watercolor month. You're going to create one piece of watercolor art per day if you want. Now the prompt lists are, they do exist if you want to. Of course you do not need to create one piece per day. If you're someone who wants to focus on a different way of using watercolor, maybe one per week, month, every couple of days, or even just focus really hard on one giant watercolor or small one for the entire month. But this is great for is focusing on one medium, specifically watercolor and doodle wash has come up with this month to raise awareness of the importance of art and creativity. World watercolor month is for, is for sharing things and being part of a community all about watercolor. You can find it at doodle wash.com slash world watercolor month, July and the socialist, our world watercolor month. And you can see some fantastic work that has been done if you go there. Another interesting one is to focus now on urban sketching. So we've been talking a lot about things like creatures and the world as it is in our minds. And urban sketching is the world as it is around us. One per day through July. You can use any medium, but generally speaking, pen and ink and watercolor are very traditional. Now some artists are using Procreate as well on their iPad to go and do urban sketching. And other people are doing some truly interesting things using maybe pastels or acrylics on location. The goal is to create one urban sketch per day. Now if you aren't familiar with urban sketching, I do have a number of urban sketching courses on Skillshare and there's a ton of other information you can look at. But the idea is to go out on location in your own world. So you're going to look and see what's out there, even if it's just something on your lunch break or if it's your house or your neighbor's house or the school across the street. That's how urban sketching works and you're going to go and draw it from life. The socials are kicker urban sketching. And it's really fantastic for honestly is to get out of your house and go and draw something in your own neighborhood. And that's what you're gonna be doing when you go urban sketching into a really experienced the world as it is around you in your own environment. Kicking the creatives.com slash kick urban sketching is where you should get started. August is a time of puns and the two aren't challenges. I'm going to be showing you today for August. Art challenges are going to be all centered around fun ones. The first one is small August. It is one of my favorites and the idea is one per day throughout August using any medium that you want. Typically, people tend to use other digital media or very fast media like a pencil, rather than very slow media like pen and ink. You want to create one artwork that focuses on a dragon, Smaug the dragon from Tolkien's The Hobbit. And you want to create one dragon artwork per day using the socials some August. It is fantastic for imaginative work, but also for some freedom and free form character design. So dragons can be anything, and it's really fantastic if you want to go and explore your own creativity and making your own creatures brush warriors.com slash smug is strong. Challenge is a great place to start. For dog lovers out there. My recommendation would be to do degassed and August is again one per day throughout August. And anything really goes here to create one dog art work per day. And you're going to share that with the socials. Hashtag, dog, is it just fantastic for pet lovers, dog lovers or anyone looking to improve observation skills, especially if you draw from life. So the fun part about this, if you have your own fluffy Pooch and you're going to try to do a life drawing. Well, your dog is probably not going to sit still for you while you take three or 4 h to do the drawing. So you have to focus on that. Very quick observational skills in drawing. Drawing from photographs are also perfectly acceptable. And if you're going to do that, maybe you want to really focus on pushing yourself to get the drawing accurate. It is curated by an Instagram account called instagram.com slash dogs in August. In September, my recommendation is to choose to either reset or to really explore your own creativity as you move forward. So let's talk about exploring that first with sword timbre. Timbre is something in September that every single day and digital is very, very popular for this, you're going to create one artwork that features a sword. Or if you're someone who really likes the mythology around sorts, perhaps you're going to create a new fantasy sword every day. Or you're going to focus on a historical sword that you're going to draw every single day or paint or create an artwork focused around the socials are sorted timber, and it's fantastic for fantasy artists and also some history buffs, people who generally speaking like the mythology surrounding sorts. It is in fact, curated by someone named faith Schaeffer. She has an Instagram account at instagram.com slash faith underscore Schaeffer, if you want to see some previous timber stuff, go ahead and check her out. On the Reset side of things we have sketched timber. And so this is something where you're going to be focusing on traditional media. And the recommendation is to use things like a pencil or charcoal. So real sketching media, you don't really want to focus on things like painting, because normally people don't do sketches with painting as well. The goal is to create one sketch per day, usually featuring a human figure. And so the idea behind this is to focus really strongly on art fundamentals. That's why I said that this is great for resetting. This is one of those times where you want to allow your observational skills to flourish, your capacity to work on art fundamentals like perspective and for shortening and light and shadow, all of those sorts of things. And if you head on over to sketch timber dot art, you're going to see some absolutely fantastic sketches that have been done for this art challenge. And so if you're someone who really wants to focus on the fundamentals, I recommend that. Alright, so if you have followed with us for this long than we are in the homestretch. We have three more months to go, October to December. Let's go for it. 7. October to December: October to December, and not surprisingly, is all about winter and Christmas and the festive seasons. October itself is generally speaking, quite spooky and very inky. We're going to be talking about probably the most famous drawing challenge of them all, which is in cutover. So we've already talked about October 52. And October is going to give you the idea of focusing on pen and ink, or ink in general, once per day. Now, October is a lot of fun. I swear it's a ton of fun and there's a lot of work you can do using only pen and ink or ink in general. I love doing October and I have a hole Skillshare class on October. If you want to learn how to better succeed at October, I will leave the link in the description of this class. The medium now Inc must feature prominently. So there are no particular restrictions like in inky April where you can only use ink and this one you can use whatever it is you want as long as Inc. features prominently pencil sketches are allowed, mixed media is also allowed. The goal is to create one drawing per day based on the prompts and your socials are going to be either hashtag October or hashtag October 2020, X where X is a year you're doing it. E.g. this year was October 2022. It is fantastic for focusing on one medium, for focusing on detail ink drawing typically is very detailed and it's also really great for focusing on drawing. And if you want to learn more about it, you can head on over to october.com. Tinker lab has another October sketch challenge and this is what I recommend you do if you're sitting there saying, I don't really know what to do. It's halfway through the fall in my area here, I don't know what I want to draw. Well, how about just doing a bunch of sketches for the entire month of October? You can use any medium, but again, you are recommended to keep it sketchy. And so things like pencils are great. Maybe you don't want to do this challenge with oils unless you are really fantastic at sketching and oils. The goal is to create one sketch per day based on the prompts. And these social is going to be tinker sketch and then also tinker sketch 2020 x, where x is the year you're doing it. It is fantastic for capturing essential details and you can take a look at Tinker lab.com slash October art challenge. November is an interesting month because it doesn't have anything going on in it. So we have American Thanksgiving perhaps. But if you think about where November is, it is halfway between Halloween and Christmas season and the festive season. And November itself is just a month is hanging there, were willing and waiting for creativity to fill it up. Probably the most interesting one that I've ever heard of is called hue member. So one per day throat November, the way WHO member works as you need to be using colored media and digital is perfectly fine, but they're going to give you a color prompt. So rather than specifically a prompt or something to draw, they're going to say Today's prompt is in yellow. And then you have to take that color and create one artwork per day featuring that Hugh, either heavily or if you want to do it in an interesting way, make it so that's an accent color that really brings the piece together. But the goal is to focus on color. Socialists hashtag, November. And it is fantastic for Mastering Color and exploring different colors and really getting a handle on how your colors mix and work and how to make one color be the focus where you should start with his brushwork is.com says, what is Hugh member? And you can start there and start following the links because there's a ton of information about how to do huge member successfully. A lot of these art challenges have been about getting one thing done per day or per week or per month. Slow member is an interesting art challenge. First of all, you'll notice there are no socials, there are no real websites here. This is more of a philosophy that says, hey, if we've been going very hard for the entire year, before we start all that up again, before the holiday season descends upon us, maybe now it's time. Slow down. Work on one artwork throat November. Only one. Make it fantastic. Make it something that if you were going to apply to art school, you would want to put into your portfolio if you were going to walk up to a gallery and say, I want to show this piece. This is the piece that you would give them that says this is everything I can do and this was slow to embrace. It's interesting. It's a focused thing. It's something where you can really allow yourself to explore what you can do if you take your time. They've only been a couple of times when I've talked about things that aren't visual arts. Well, nano Rhino is the probably premier of those National Novel Writing month. And people typically pronounce it as an enter remote, and they're fine with that as well. And how it works is it's throat. All of November. The medium must be writing it. You're going to be creating a novel. It is National Novel Writing Month. And interestingly enough, it is actually international now. So it should be like I90 Rhino or something, but they didn't ever call it that. The goal is to write at least 50,000 words. It must be a piece of fiction. So there's a lot of questions people asked me. Well, hang on a second. Can I write my biography? Where can I write a piece of nonfiction? Well, no, the whole point of nano Rhino is to write a novel. And if you don't wanna do that, then maybe none of them is not for you. Planning ahead is okay. So this is something that's interesting and putting into Rhino is that you cannot write ahead, so you can't actually put your fingers on your keyboard and start reading about what the characters are doing in the scenes that they're in. But you can absolutely plan ahead. You can make up your characters, you can make the general ideas of the plot. But whatever is going to go into your novel must be created from the 1st of November to the loss of November social zone and a rhino and something that's very interesting button then I Rhino is they actually have quite a bit of social events to attend, typically in larger cities throughout the world. And if you go to nano rambo.org, you will actually see a significant number of ways that you can participate. And now that we're out of the pandemic, hopefully, we're going to start looking at a lot more events that happen where you actually go to maybe a cafe and you write for a couple of hours with other people who are working on the same challenge. Well, it's finally time to wrap up the year with art challenges. The first one I recommend you look at is doodle washes December art challenge. Now remember we saw doodle watch back in July for the watercolor month. Due to watch this December, our challenge is the throat December, the medium again is specifically focusing on watercolor, but you don't have to, but due to wash really, they tend to focus on watercolor a lot because that is what they are. Medium of choice is the goal is to create one painting per day. Prompts are winter themed, so that's why this one is a very interesting art challenge if you're really willing to explore the idea of snowy winters. And that's where, what's happening, where you are. Then this is a great art challenge for you. Socialist hashtag due to watch December 2022. There are other years, so if you're watching this in a different year, you can go ahead and just change that. It is great for having fun with illustrations. So the prompts are really focused around having some fun illustrations around winter themes like snowman or gingerbread. And you're going to have a lot of fun with that due to wash.com slash December 2022. Art challenge is the URL. Tail assembler is a very interesting one as well because it is completely open how you interpret it. So usually there's going to be a prompt per week or more accurately, a prompt for several days and you're going to be working on. And it is so open you can mix it up. So a lot of people take tales timber, and they decide to make a drawing first and then tell the story about it and maybe make an animation all in one month. The goal is to make art that tells stories and the social sort of December. And it's great for anyone who likes world-building and fantasy. So if you want to get started, you can look at brush warriors.com slash TSM birth challenge. However, there's actually an entire subreddit developed Around world-building and they are the ones who curated. So red.com slash our soft world-building is going to get you to an interesting place of the Internet where you have a whole bunch of people interested in building their own fantasy worlds and talking about tail summer. We made it through the hole here. Let's talk about our class project and let me see what you can do. 8. Class Project: I think you can imagine with the class project would be, I want you to pick at least one challenge to do. Now, I've given you many suggestions, but there's no need to follow only what I've told you. If you find an art challenge or you make one yourself that you really like, go ahead and do that, That sounds great. I want to see you sharing your goals on the discussion board of this class. I want to start talking to you about what you're planning on doing and giving you advice and asking you questions as well. I want you to share your progress and I want to see your challenges at the end. So thank you very much for listening to this class. I hope that has given you some great ideas about how you can challenge yourself. And I'm really curious to see what you're gonna do with it.