365 daily drawing challenge 2020-21
I successfully completed a year of daily drawings!!!
As I failed this task more than once before, never getting past the first two months, I gave myself a set of rules for this challenge. I observed in the past that having set limits actually helps the creative flow.:
1 drawing a day, 2 minutes or more. The aim of the challenge being about the process, not the result. I noticed that I never made it past the first month or two because I felt the need to make every picture good and detailed which put me off even starting when I didn’t have the energy or motivation.
Any pen - but pen being important so I can’t loose time in indecisiveness and rubbing out pencil to start again. It helps also to draw with intuition and work with what you’ve got, more impulsively
Inside a box. When I draw the box it gives me a frame or a canvas to work with. Drawing the box starts the flow and working within that limit helps the ideas come faster.
Draw only with my left hand. This was because I had/ have problems with repetitive strain injury in my right hand. (classic artist and musician problem) For a few months I couldn’t use it at all so started training my left and realised how important my hands are as tools for my creative outlet, so I want to keep both hands trained to even the load. This also helped with a feeling of accomplishment and installing subconsciously how much practise daily really helps.
Draw the feeling of the day, or whatever comes intuitively to the energy and mood of that day, acting as a visual mood tracker.
Record the moon phases every day. I believe that the moon has a big effect on our emotions and energy and when you get to know these you can actively live more in tune and harmony with the moon, helping to use and save your energy wisely. However, before actively doing this I wanted to use this year as an experiment, to test the theory. At the end of the year I can then analyse if there has been a noticeable pattern for myself before then becoming more conscious with it.
I learnt so much with this project. Firstly for most of the year I didn’t, for various reasons, do much big, finished or really accomplished art work. I doubted myself at times feeling bad that I hadn’t done enough, but after a few months I started to see what a huge body of work I had created.
I became really comfortable with free creating and acknowledging the ‘bad’ pictures as much as the ‘good’ ones. Looking back through my pictures took me on a journey, being able to remember exactly where I was or what I was feeling with each of those pictures. Some days I resented the project and only managed some angry scribbles and at other times I could spend hours, but this in itself became the whole point of the project.
As well as being able to see my emotions and mood changes in the content of the pictures, it also showed me a lot about my feelings based on the amount of effort and detail I put into the pictures on that day. Whether they were delicate precise marks or big messy scribbles, and by the end of the year there were some reoccurring characters and themes. I haven’t analysed everything in detail yet but I already notice there are some patterns in when these characters pop up and when the pictures become more detailed.
This is a project that I plan to continue year after year.
It also helped to give me structure and routine. On those days where depression takes over and its hard to navigate anything (particularly in 2020) at least there is one thing that I know happens every day for me.
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