I drew everyday for 30 days: Here’s what happened 🤯

I drew everyday for 30 days + posted my art on Instagram. What happened? Well, the results are… pretty impressive. Check them yourself! Results, tips, and lessons learned.

Why did I draw everyday?

In April 2023, I decided to participate in the Plein Airpril drawing challenge.

“Plein air” is a fancy term that basically means painting or drawing outside.

So, during Plein Airpril, you try to make art outside every day for 30 days in April. Alternately, you can paint from photo refences — and that’s what I did.

Drawing everyday: results during and after 30 days

Problems I faced when drawing day after day

• Staying motivated — I wanted to give up a few times, but since I knew it’s only 30 days, I made it ‘till the end.
• Posting on Instagram everyday — To motivate myself more, I decided I want to post my illustrations on IG. This was an additional challenge — I had to create 30 images good enough (in my opinion) to be shown to people online. I’m not equally happy with all the artworks I produced, but I think I did okay overall.
• Finding the time everyday — It’s not that easy to find 1–2 hours to draw everyday when you work full-time. Additionally, drawing is not a piece of cake — it can really drain you both physically and mentally, because you need even more focus and energy to finish an illustration when you have so little time to do it. Finally, posting on Instagram takes time, too.
• Drawing fast — when you want to produce a finished illustration in max 2 hours there’s no other way — you have to draw really fast and simplify things wherever you can, as every detail will only take you more minutes to complete the drawing.

How my art changed

I managed to overcome the challenges and create 30 full illustrations day after day in April 2023. Results? My art changed A LOT. It’s really amazing how much I managed to learn in just one month! See below.

In short, that’s illustration #1:

And that’s illustration #30:

Quite a difference, huh? My art has become more defined, more interesting, simply better.

Let’s investigate in more detail.

Days 1–9

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I hate these illustrations, I just think they’re rather simple and maybe not super interesting. Nice, but nothing special.

Day 10

Something more interesting is going on here, and I’m beginning to stick to the “urban” theme more. Still, I really can’t stand this artwork. 😅

Days 11–16

Way more interesting artoworks, with better value schemes, and rather saturated and vivid colors.

Days 17–30

Keeping up with what I established in days 11–16, but the colors are getting a little less saturated. I especially like artworks 30, 25, 24, and 17 — they give off the melancholy vibe.

What I learned about drawing everyday

Drawing everyday gave me so, so much. Here are my observations from the 30 day drawing challenge.

Drawing everyday: What I learned about art in general

• Use strong light and light with defined shapes — I’m a big fan of golden hour, so that’s a double win. In general, adding strong light and defined shapes helps make it way more interesting to look at. Of course, it might not suite your style. But if it does, then as I said: double win.
• Limitation is innovation — It’s hard, I admit, but it’s limitations that make us more and more creative. When there’s no challenge, we become lazy.
• Limitation leads to art style — with limited time you quickly find out what you want and don’t want in your illustrations, which translates to finding your art style.
• Add characters to your artworks — if that’s okay with what you want to paint. In general, people are always a great focal point and add a bit of storytelling to every artwork.

Drawing everyday: What I learned bout digital painting

• Use selection tools and big brushes — Be it lasso tool, rectangular selection, or a big square brushes — these are the fastest ways to select a shape and fill it with color.
• Create a small set of brushes and stick to it — so that you don’t have to look for new brushes and experiment all the time. Your brushset should ideally consist of:
• 1 x soft brush
• 1 x hard brush
• 1 x thin brush (ink-like or pencil-like = for details)
• 2 x textured brushes of your choice
• Use blending modes — fill a layer with color of your choice, put it on top of your illustration, and play with blending modes and opacity. I usually combine 3 layers of different colors, textures, and blending modes. This way even the worst color choice will look much better.

Real benefits of drawing everyday

Let’s summarize how the drawing challenge benefited me (and how it can be valuable to you).

You develop a drawing habit

If you draw regularly, you begin to notice that drawing and finishing a drawing becomes easier and easier. You get stuck less often, and the overal drawing process goes much smoother.

You boost your drawing skills (a lot)

Go back to “How my art changed” above. 👆 Basically, the difference is huuuuuge.

You find your art style

Yes! Yes, even if you’re just an aspiring artist.

When you’re forced to draw everyday, and you only have 1, max 2 hours per day for it, you quickly learn how to speed up the process.

You learn where to simplify things (everything), what elements of your painting you can leave out (basically most things that are not you focal points), where you can cheat (bye detailed hand drawings), what brushes will get you faster where you want to be with your artwork, and so on.

And that, my friends, is an artstyle.

EXTRA Improved Instagram stats

More Instagram stats = bigger reach = more likes = more followers.

And if you’re very lucky, like me, you can even accidentally gain +1,200 followers overnight…

How Poland’s leading convenience store promoted my art for free 🐸

Drawing everyday and iterative learning

Now, let me explain why this works, and why iterative learning (=learning through frequent repetition) is so imporant to see results. We’ll start with a little story.

Jerry Uelsmann was a photography professor known for his experimental and surreal photo montages.

In one of his photo classes, students were split into two groups: the “quantity” team aimed for lots of photos, while the “quality” team focused on just one perfect shot.

Who do you think won?

Surprisingly, the quantity team produced the best photos by actively trying things, making mistakes, and learning. The quality team, fixated on perfection, ended up with only a few results, and they weren’t great.

The lesson here goes beyond photos — it’s about life. Taking action and learning as you go is crucial, rather than getting stuck in the quest for a perfect plan. As Voltaire said, sometimes aiming for the best can slow you down. It’s a reminder that “the best is the enemy of the good.”

What lessons can we, drawing adapts, learn from this experiment?

1. Draw a Lot: Like taking many photos helped in the experiment, drawing every day improves your skills.
2. Learn from Mistakes: Drawing a bunch lets you make mistakes and learn from them, making you better each time.
3. Don’t Aim for Perfect: Trying to be perfect can stop you from drawing. Embrace mistakes; they help you grow.
4. Build a Collection: Drawings add up over time, showing progress. It’s better than waiting for the perfect drawing.

How can you stay motivated to draw everyday?

Okay, we all know now that drawing everyday will give you amazing results. But how do you do that?

You don’t have to draw everyday!

First of all, don’t force it. Forcing yourself to draw everyday even if you completely don’t feel like doing it will quickly kill your creativity and make you hate art.

But here’s a recipe for those cheat moments:

In the days when you dont draw, you can watch a Youtube art video on drawing theory or read an article (on my blog wink wink) — this way, you won’t feel like you’re not doing what you should do.

It’s okay to not be motivated, to not give your 100%. Maybe you’re in a period where you can only give 10% — and that’s totally okay.

Do drawing exercises

It’s not like you have to create a finished artwork everyday. Actually, maybe you even shouldn’t — as I wrote above, I felt pretty burned out halfway through the challenge, so the same could happen to you.

Instead, you can practice. There’s a bunch of drawing exercises out there, some of them even as simple as “draw a straight line x50 times” (quite a useful skill, tbh).

For now, all I can tell you is: type “drawing exercises” and choose the ones you like.

I’m working on a HUGE drawing exercise list. I want collect all the exercises I’ve come across the all the years of my self-studying art and categorize them in different ways… but it’s taking time. And since I’m the “go hard or go home” type of person, I won’t publish the list once it’s really polished out.

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Take part in an art challenge

Quite a good way to motivate yourself to draw everyday, especially if you commit yourself to posting your artwork everyday on Instagram or Twitter (you won’t want to break the streak).

Here’s a list of posts where I collect drawing challenges for each month of the year.

Hack your mind (*my way*)

I wrote an entire article dedicated to having a drawing session everyday, so check it out, too: How To Draw Everyday: My Method (It Works)

What to draw for everyday practice?

Here are a few suggestion what can be the object of your everyday drawing practice:

• gesture drawing,
• life drawing,
• figure drawing,
• drawing portraits,
• a quick sketch of an everyday object,
• drawing faces.

Again, the “what to draw” article is on the to-do list, so just bear with me. 🙏

Summary: Drawing everyday. Results

Daily drawing sessions are an amazing method of enhancing your painting skills.

One of the best ways to draw everyday is through participation in an art challenge. Challenge yourself at least once a year for 30 days, and I promise you’ll see results.

I think all the things I’ve learned in April stick with my when I create new artworks today. However, I feel like I have taken a little step back since then in terms of how smooth my creative process goes. That’s why I’m looking forward to another Plein Airpil challenge to tweak my art skills again!