Goal Met – Create 50 Art Pieces

I’ve always like sketching and painting – when I was a kid my favorite class was art. I actually was good enough to get a few different scholarship offers to art school but was talked out of going and instead went into technology and the rest, they say, is history.

I have a few sketch pads on my shelves filled with honest efforts to start drawing and painting again but they usually only have a few pages in them before life just gets too busy and I need to start prioritizing where I spend my time. I’ve always wondered if downplaying the need to create is leading to a more stressful life as it’s one of the things I truly enjoy doing. However, I find myself in a cycle where I pick it up again, I suck at it, I keep trying and get some skills back, then put it away only to repeat this cycle the next time I feel the need to start drawing again.

So I thought if I forced myself to create 50 pieces of art this year I’d kickstart those old habits and maybe pick up something fun again. I didn’t limit it to sketching or drawing, I included things like videos but only if they required something creative (like rotoscoping, green screens, etc.)

As to what to draw? That actually was a bigger challenge. I searched out daily sketch idea websites and they seemed OK. I had a book ‘sketch with dad’ where my daughter and I would take turns drawing in the book and I did a bunch of directed draw videos with my son teaching him how to draw by following along with him.

One old sketchbook idea reared its head when I was digging out some old art books – I had planned to draw all the creatures in the D&D Monster Manual (original version, TYVM)I don’t know how long that project has been simmering but I thought hey – I need some inspiration on days when nothing else is working so I’d randomly pick a monster and then draw it using the book/websites as a source.

Here’s some things I learned: I absolutely suck at drawing human faces. I mean, it’s embarrassing how bad it is – like a knockoff version of the uncanny valley. One of the things I want to work on after this 50 for 50 thing is done is just drawing faces one after another until I can make a person not look like a homunculus.

That being said – I did enjoy drawing and even when it didn’t turn out good I learned something about proportion, anatomy, and texturing.