WILL YOU JOIN ME ON A 14 DAY ART CHALLENGE TO GET YOUR CREATIVE JUICES FLOWING?
It’s almost back to school time and despite not being a student for quite the while now, I get itchy fingers at this time of year. I yearn to delve into new projects. This year, I am setting my own art challenge for 14 days and invite you to join me.
Why a 14 Day Art Challenge?
Well, whilst I love the concept of a month long challenge, inevitably I find them too big, too intimidating and either too tight or too off topic for me to get started.
14 days worth of prompts, together with some guidance on here seem far more achievable. Plus there is no specific time window to do this in. By all means join me in late August/early September but don’t let the calendar stop you picking it up in January or June.
What’s the “Theme”?
This challenge is simply a collection of my favourite techniques and/or media. You can interpret them as loosely or tightly as suits your art practice. The idea is to cut down on decision fatigue enough for you to make marks on a page, but not be so restrictive as to stifle any creative sparks you have.
Let me walk you through the thoughts I had as I drew up this list:
The Prompts
The Prompts
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Graphite drawing
Sketching with a soft pencil = my most early memories of art at school, and for many a year following it. It’s as basic as it comes but you can do wonderful things with a few grades of graphite alone.
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Fude pen illustration
Line work illustrations transport me back to the work of Quentin Blake in Roald Dahl’s children books. It’s evocative and surprisingly energetic – I look forwards to inking up an animal for this prompt.
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Single colour study
This is a foundational technique in art – depicting a subject in just one colour forces you to consider contrast and form; and not just focus on “what you know to be there”. You have to paint the darks and leave the lights. It’s a fabulous training exercise for any future art you want to make!
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Watercolour
Ah, my first love. It’s so immediate and professional watercolours are so richly pigmented, its a joy to watch wet paint dance across the page. Go purist and only use watercolour or mix it with pen, pencil or whatever else your heart tells you it needs.
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Gouache
I use my gouache more like watercolour than acrylics. My work is more diluted down washes than thick impasto like strokes. But it is a fabulous base to add other media on top of so I suspect that’s how I will take this prompt.
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Coloured pencils
I love adding shading, detail and line with pencils in the later stages of my mixed media work. Give me a palette of muted tones of buttery soft pencils and I am a happy little blueberry. But it might be interesting to use them for a whole piece or in a totally different experimental way, we’ll see where I take this one!
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Mixed media (inc collage?)
I am looking forward to having a good play with my mounds of art materials for this prompt. I shall let instinct guide me and grab paints/pens/pastels/pencils at whim. When thinking about using lots of media in one piece, I think a good place to start is think what colour you need then find a material that delivers that, and so on…
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3 materials challenge
This is the one prompt I am borrowing from another artist – this is ran by Charlotte Durance on Instagram and their rules are to use 3 materials, draw from life and do it in under 30 minutes. I plan on everything being doable before I go to my day job including filming and photographing so this really appeals to me. I just need to be mindful to pick one dark dark and one light light of whatever materials I chose or it will lack any depth or definition.
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Analogous colour palette
Limited colour palettes are such great fun. You discover just how much you can achieve through limitations and rather than picking the traditional variation on a triad of primaries, I want to experiment with a limited palette of analogous colours. That is colours next to or close to one another on the colour wheel. Think of a palette from blue to turquoise, purple to lilac or yellow ochre to red iron oxide.
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Repeating pattern
I don’t make art digitally but I love to use Procreate on my iPad for photo editing (as I don’t have the need or budget for PhotoShop on another monthly subscription) and also, for making repeating patterns from my traditional media work. I’ll do a quick How To for this prompt to give you a push to make your own wrapping/collage paper or fabric!
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Acrylic painting
During my GCSEs, I remember using lots of acrylic paint to make large scale pieces for my art coursework. But Student grade paint wasn’t amazing back then and I quickly jumped ship to watercolour. Fast forward 20 plus years and I am back in love with large scale acrylic painting. For this challenge, I have a more achievable piece I will do as there’s no way I can knock out a finished A1 canvas before work!
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Sketch journaling
This is just such a joy. It’s creativity meeting mental wellness practice; like yoga with a sketchbook, instead of a roll out mat. Drawing your day is a perfect place to start when you don’t know what to draw but feel the need to create anyway. Draw what is around you, what you did or how you felt. There’s no rules, just lots and lots of catharsis.
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Watercolour triad portrait
This was a pandemic art practice I indulged in and it is so freeing. Once you stop worrying about mixing the perfect skin tone, and instead think of tone in the sense of value (or contrast) then portraiture becomes radically less intimidating.
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(Grid of) mini landscape studies
The final prompt is taking the pressure off by going very small scale. Tape off some little squares and rectangles then get to work painting mini landscapes. Pull up scenery you like in royalty free sites like Unsplash or Pexels and use them as inspiration, delve into old holiday photos (on your phone or in a shoe box under the bed) or head to your favourite landscape artist’s insta feed and do studies from their studies. The tape peel is delicious on a finished grid of mini paintings!
See you over on Instagram for the challenge, starting Sunday 1st September 2024.
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