How a Daily Art Challenge Can Improve Your Art Skills

Learn How a Daily Art Challenge Can Improve Your Skills

There are so many benefits to doing a daily art challenge. The most important of those is the increase in your creativity and art skills that you’ll gain. This is an extremely powerful creativity exercise, but an art challenge will also help you get into the habit of drawing daily.

You’re probably more familiar with 3o day drawing challenges, which are also highly beneficial. You can read more about that in 30 Day Challenge.

However, for many people, myself included, 30 days is just too much of a commitment. An art challenge isn’t going to help you it you give up half way through.

Therefore I prefer doing a 7 day art challenge and I think you’ll enjoy them more as well. Let’s learn more about the benefits of doing these challenges, and how they will help your art skills and creativity.

What Is an Art Challenge

The main goal of an art challenge is to get you in the habit of drawing on a regular basis. There are tons of art challenges available on the internet, or you can set your own challenge. This is typically done by coming up with a set of “rules” for the challenge.

This can include a topic for your artwork and the medium you’ll be using. As well as how often or the total number of drawings you’ll be doing.

How Much Should I Draw Everyday?

If you want to improve your drawing, art, or creativity, you’ll want to get into the habit of drawing everyday. You’ll get more benefits from drawing for a few minutes each day than if you try to find extended periods of time to work on your artwork.

Even if you only work for five or ten minutes each day you’ll start to see some improvements. And if you already know what you’re going to draw each day that time will be spent on your artwork and not trying to come up with ideas.

FREE 7 Day Challenge Quick Start Guide

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Art Challenge Drawing Themes

The best way to improve your drawing and artistic abilities is through practice and repetition. By setting a theme for your drawings, you are able to narrow down your focus.

Drawing every day will improve your skills regardless of what you draw. But, if you want to get more creative and develop a style, establishing a theme is the way to go.

So what is a theme exactly? A theme can be anything. It could be clowns, cityscapes, cars, sunsets, animals, or anything else you might want to get better at drawing.

When choosing a theme you should pick something that will benefit you and help with your goals. For example, if you want to get better at drawing cartoon cats you would set that as your theme. You would then draw 7 cartoon cats in 7 days, or however long it takes you to finish them.

But you should be drawing at least a few minutes everyday.

What you will notice is that by the third or fourth drawing you’ll start to feel a shift in your creativity. Repetition is one of the most important aspects of getting better at art and drawing.

It is also key in developing your creativity and artistic style.

Finding Your Artistic Style with a 7 Day Art Challenge

One of the other benefits of doing a 7 day art challenge is the development of your artistic style. If you want to get better at a specific medium or technique you can add that as part of your art challenge.

Such as, watercolor cityscapes or clowns with markers on toned paper. The more you practice drawing, the quicker you will begin developing your own style.

Working on your line work is a great skill to develop with a 7 day art challenge. There are a lot of options with your lines, shading, and composition that you can improve with an art challenge.

Try new things and see what you can come up with. The reason these challenges help is because after a few drawings you’ll automatically start to push yourself to try new things. Through repetition you’ll want to experiment and do something new.

Because in reality, drawing the same thing 7 times would be extremely boring. But if you can change it up a bit and try new things, they become exciting and beneficial.

Benefits of Drawing Everyday

First and foremost drawing everyday will help you improve your art skills. Everything requires practice to get better. Drawing isn’t a skill that certain people were born with. It’s a skill, like anything else, that is developed with practice and repetition.

Drawing, or creating art, is highly therapeutic and relaxing for most people. You shouldn’t feel stressed when your drawing. If drawing causes you stress you’re putting too much emphasis on the outcome.

If you can’t relax when you’re drawing, you should try making smaller drawings that have less of a time investment. Or just start doing quick sketches.

Drawing everyday will help you improve your creativity. As we discussed earlier, by drawing daily and using a theme you’ll naturally start to experiment and try new things. This will force you to experiment with your drawings and art.

You’ll also start to develop your artistic style, which is one of the things many new artists struggle with. Start to draw everyday and you’ll struggle much less.

How to Start a 7 Day Art Challenge

To start your own art challenge all you need to do is establish the “rules” for yourself. These rules will be largely determined by what you want to accomplish.

Once you’ve set your rules, you need to decide what format you will use for your challenge.

You could do all of your drawings in a sketchbook. Or you can do them on drawing or computer paper. I use cardstock quite a bit for my drawings. You can use any medium on it and it holds up really well.

I prefer to do most of my drawings on artist trading cards (ATCs). The cards are small so they can be completed quickly. And the best part is that they can be traded when I’m finished with my artwork.

Learn more about this miniature form of art in Artist Trading Cards for Beginners.

Art Challenge Grid

Alternatively, you could use grids for your drawings. I’ve done this for both 7 day and 30 day challenges and it works out really well. You could draw out equally sized boxes for each of your drawings, or you can very the size like I did for this challenge.

Looking at this now, I wish I would have done these on artist trading cards. They would have made nice looking cards.

However you approach your art challenge, just set some rules for yourself and give it a shot. The more you do, the better results you will see. What typically happens with me is that I continue working past the 7 drawings and find myself coming up with more and more ideas for drawings.

It’s an amazing feeling when your mind shifts into creativity mode.

Art Challenge Ideas to Get You Started

Robots
Palm Trees
Faces
Monsters
Roses
Sunflowers
Reindeer
Eyes
Lips
Snowmen
Penguins
Hearts
Mountains
Letters (pick 1 letter)
Dragon Eyes
Op Art Bullseye
Boombox
Graffiti Spray cans
Owls
Butterflies
Skulls
Sugar Skulls
Cityscapes
Spooky Trees
Jack o Lanterns