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Share Your Creativity

For those wishing to share their artists' stories, their creations, or their tips and tricks to be creative.

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What I Learned from Setting Myself Five Creative Challenges

7 min readJul 9, 2023

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Illustration by the author from challenge #5

In the space of about a year, I set myself five personal creative challenges.

You may have heard of popular challenges like Inktober and NaNoWriMo, where you aim to write or draw every day, or reach a certain word count in a month.

I sensed the excitement around these challenges every year and even participated on rare occasions. I enjoyed it, but the timing and parameters of the challenge never felt right for where I was in my projects.

I’d also taken classes that followed a structure similar to these challenges. I was more successful at completing the classes, and following the structure always paid off enormously in productivity and skill building. Still, I found them taxing and overly restrictive. By the end, my willpower and creative resources were depleted.

Both of these experiences planted the seed that maybe I could design my own challenge, tailored to my goals and work style exactly.

I set myself a ten-day drawing challenge in May 2022, and came away from the experience so delighted that I set myself four more in the year that followed.

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Share Your Creativity
Share Your Creativity

Published in Share Your Creativity

For those wishing to share their artists' stories, their creations, or their tips and tricks to be creative.

Deepti Kannapan
Deepti Kannapan

Written by Deepti Kannapan

Painter, occasional cartoonist, aerospace engineer. Writes about sustainable technology, creativity, and journaling.

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