Last night I (mostly) successfully finished The Twenty-Eight Day Art Challenge.
I admit it was a bit of a struggle to find time and energy to draw something every day for 28 days but it was a fantastic exercise and I’m ending the month more energized (and exhausted) than I began it.
Balancing home and toddlers (the boy is almost 22 months, the girl is almost 4) with trying to make time to work,  there were days (days? who am I kidding – I was doing this pretty late at night!) when I was had to push through a wall and one day where I was just not feeling well at all. I had drawn “something” earlier that day for my daughter’s “homework” so that P for Pig had to suffice for day 25. Hey, I drew something. It counted!
I wasn’t always able to stick 100% to my topic because sometimes I felt like drawing something else. But that’s ok too. My main goal was to explore and grow and exercise. And then learn to manage the floodgates in the time allotted. Sometimes (like last night on day 28!) I just plum ran out of time and I had that Project Runway choice of “make it work” or start over at 11:45pm. Meh. It’s not perfect but that’s why it’s a sketch!
“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.â€
— Chuck Jones
Here is a great post from Art Director and fellow Artist, Giuseppe Castellano on the subjects of time, self-editing and personal resource management. This could not have been a more timely read for me. An excellent post which reminds me it’s probably time to have another look at The War of Art.
I also used to be one of those artists who had to have a completely clean space before I could begin. That’s probably some sort of metaphor for how I live my life. Anyway…
Thank you, again, Diandra Mae and Sylvia Liu of Kidlit411 for the challenge.
Thank you to fellow Artist, Autumn Seybert for including “Day 23, Toad King Welcomes Spring” in your #ThinkSpringArt series.
A gallery of the second half of my (mostly) holiday-themed submissions are posted below the social links. But I’m going to to continue posting my sketchings on Twitter and Instagram with occasional updates here on my website as usual. Stay tuned for some COLOR!
