Art challenges every artist should take!
Some practices can be boring, especially if you spend many hours on them to achieve your goal. Yes, drawing takes a lot of time and patience. Sometimes it can be really demotivating and discouraging when you struggle with something, spend the amount of time on training, but don’t see any progress. So, I gathered this list of fun challenges, that not only will help you deal with your art block but will also help you improve the drawing skills. Check them out!
1. #ArtVsArtist
Briefly, ArtVsArtist is a collage compound from 8 artworks and one photo – the artist’s photo, which is usually placed in the middle, surrounded by 8 squares with artist’s works. This project is quite popular on social media – Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, and DeviantArt. The purpose of it is to reveal artist’s face – since many artists use social media only to post their artworks, it’s a great way to introduce yourself to your followers.
The history of this challenge, examples and a #ArtVsArtist template you can find here: link
2. Draw this again
This is my favorite challenge! And a perfect way to check how much you have improved. In this challenge, you pick one of your old artworks and draw it again – of course, implementing everything you have learned so far. It’s hard to see a progress comparing few artworks drew in a close amount of time. After a year (or even few months) of drawing, you will be able to see your mistakes and know how to fix them.
Redrawing your artwork will show you how much you have improved, and keep you motivated (well, what’s a bigger motivator than seeing a huge progress?
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3. Inktober
Probably many of you scrolling through Facebook drawing groups or your favorite artist’s Instagram can see drawings with unusual topics marked with a hashtag #inktober.
“Inktober” is a combination of the word “INK” and the end of the month October. Every October, artists all over the world take on the Inktober drawing challenge by doing one ink drawing a day the entire month.
The official website www.inktober.com, created by Jake Parker, every year on October gives a list of topics that should be accomplished day after day. Inktober is about growing and improving and forming positive habits, so the more you’re consistent the better.
4. Left hand
The “left hand” challengers have a seemingly easy task to fulfill. You have to use your non-dominant hand to create an artwork. Usually, they draw the artwork with their dominant hand first, and then try to copy it with their other hand – this way is easy to compare how well you can control your non-dominant hand.
Remember, that drawing is not only about how well you can control your hand, but mostly about your imagination and the knowledge of proportions, light, etc. By the way, have you tried this challenge in the past, and your drawing was unexpectedly good? Congratulations, you might be ambidextrous! Only about one percent of people are naturally ambidextrous.
5. Art style challenge
#stylechallenge was started by a 17-year-old Instagrammer called beautifulness87. The idea is simple: draw the same character multiple times in the styles of as many popular cartoons as possible. The results are pretty awesome.
It’s also a fun exercise that will help you to deal with an art block! On the internet, you can find many sheets which you can use – or create your own sheet!
6. #100HeadsChallenge
I love drawing heads, it’s my favorite thing part to draw! Trying to show the model’s character and emotions on a paper is a challenge itself… but some people decided to go hardcore, and here’s the “Draw 100 Heads Challenge“!
So, the purpose of 100 Heads challenge is to draw 100 heads / portraits. The time limit is 10 days. It’s pretty limited, so it’s good to stick to drawing 10 heads per 1 day.
The challenge was started by Ahmed Aldoori, you can watch his taking the challenge in the video below:
Before taking the challlenge, Ahmed Aldorii created a pinterest board where he gathered about 100 photos. You can find it here.
The challenge is a good way to practice drawing faces – a similar homework get art students, but not only they have to draw a certain amount of faces, but also a certain number of hands (It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be, the hand are perhaps the most difficult body part to draw).
7. Face Your Art Challenge
Face your Art is an art challenge, where the artist makes a collage of his artworks. The collage consists of 9 different art pieces made by the challenger – usually, that are faces of the drawn characters, cropped into squares.
The Artist draws conclusions from his paintings – mostly what they have in common and what drawing mistakes the artist makes and writes them in the artwork’s description.
The Face Your art challenge was created by an Artist named Chao. Here you can find more of her artworks: ChaoIllustrations.co.uk
You can learn more about this challenge here: Face Your Art Challenge
8. MerMay Challenge
MerMay in another fun challenge that starts in May and lasts till the end of this month. The goal is to draw a Mermaid every single day! There are no restriction oh what tools you should use.
On the official Mermay.com site you can find a list of prompts for each day. It’s not mandatory to stick to the list, you can use them just as inspiration.
To learn more, visit an article dedicated to this challenge: What is MerMay Challenge?
Why you should participate in the art challenges?
Because it’s fun, improves your skills, and teaches you to stick to every professional illustrator’s routine – the daily drawing habit. Learning new things and practicing them takes time, so why not to make this more enjoyable? By the way, remember to add a proper hashtag when posting your artworks for art challenges on social media – you might gather a few new followers 😉
That’s was the list of most popular art challenges. If you know other interesting art challenges, let me know – I will check them out and add to the list!
