April 7th 2020 to July 15th 2020.
Exactly 100 days.
I set myself the goal of drawing every single day for this timeframe. The only rules were that I had to fill one page in my sketch book, and it had to be a drawing from life, no doodling. “Draw what you see” as Mr Reyes, my art teacher used to say.
I’ve always drawn, sketched, painted for as long as I can remember but in the time since I left university where drawing classes were required, I found that I haven’t been drawing as much. Like most artists who suffer from fear of failure, I used to look at other people’s drawings and think to myself, ‘why even bother…just stick to design and more digital based stuff’. But I always knew that becoming more proficient in drawing would help all aspects of what I do creatively.
Let me start by giving my expectations of this 100 day challenge. Firstly, I wanted to become better at drawing. You can look at my first few days and see that my drawings weren’t particularly good…drawing is like a muscle that you need to train and I think that my work had actually regressed from my university days. Secondly, I wanted to get more comfortable with drawing things from memory so that I can do illustration work without the need for reference photos. And lastly, I love the idea of having a visual journal/sketchbook that I can always keep and look back on and make records of places that I’ve visited.
I can’t say I was super proud of the first few days of drawing, and I didn’t particularly enjoy doing it, however after a couple weeks I was getting more confident and I think it reflected in my drawing. One thing that I consistently drew during the 100 days were hands, which is great because I can now look back on all the hands and see the progress.
Swipe through the carousel of images below to see some of the sketches (post continued below images):
Here’s what I actually learned from these 100 days of drawing:
Practice is the mother of skill. When you look at the first week compared to the last week of drawing it is night and day to see the difference in my skill level.
Staying consistent is hard! A lot of days I really didn’t feel to draw, or some days I forgot and had to get out of bed at 11:30pm to run downstairs and scribble that day’s drawing. However, staying consistent gives you the discipline to get better.
If you want to get good at something, just start doing it…and do it a lot. I really wanted to increase my skill level in drawing and it took at least a month before I was happy with what I was producing. (Granted, I have a lot of experience in visual arts, so was already starting with a solid base. If you are starting something from scratch, it will take much longer.)
I also decided to do 100 days of hand drawn typography, which after sixty-something days I decided I didn’t want to continue as it was super monotonous and I really wasn’t enjoying it. So, that served as a learning experience; if you really aren’t getting joy out of something, it’s ok to stop…even if you have invested a shit-ton of time doing it.
It really helped to immerse myself in content from other people that draw everyday. Some of the content creators that I loved learning from during this time were: Teoh Yi Chie, Alphonso Dunn, Luke Adam Hawker, Phil Dean and of course the Urban Sketchers Community.
Something really cool that came from this is that I was asked to do a drawing of a building in Trinidad for the Blog of an Architectural Firm in Trinidad. Before the 100 days of drawing, I would not have felt comfortable doing that!