HOW TO CREATE YOUR OWN ART CHALLENGE

• Why set an Art Challenge?
• What is you art challenge about
• When to start an art Challenge
• How to go about your art challenge
• Working with constraints
• Motivation and Momentum
• Tips and reflections on my own 30 day art challenge
• Go with the Flo
• When you get stuck
• Tips and reflections on my own 30 day art challenge

At any one time there are lots of art challenges going on in the art community that you can join in with. On instagram especially many art challenges have popped up as motivational prompts for creatives. There are Inktober, Februllage and the 100 day project to name a few.

I have just come to the end of a personal art challenge and wanted to share some of the things I learnt. I work as a digital collage artist, and teach art and photography. These principles I believe would apply to any visual art.

SO WHY CREATE OR JOIN AN ART CHALLENGE?

An art challenge is a great way to connect in a different way with your own art practice. Does your work lack direction? Are you stuck where to go next? Is there something you wish to explore outside of your usual remit?

A challenge can be small or big, short or long. it can act as a side project or the main focus for your work. For those of us that have jobs and other commitments along side our art practice, it can be a focused way of keeping in touch with our creative selves.

The benefit of creating or joining in an art challenge is that you can feel a sense of purpose and direction in your work. You can feel part of a community of artists all working on a similar project, especially if you are participating in a challenge on Social media. Your participation can also act as an effective marketing tool for your own work and indeed whoever sets the challenge as this is an opportunity for them to be at the centre of something which could gain momentum and followers on social media.

WHEN TO START AN ART CHALLENGE

A natural time to begin a challenge is when you sense a lull in your own work, when you come to the end of a project and are searching for a new direction, or feel a personal sense of space to explore. Projects on instagram begin at various times and last for varying lengths of time, but would tend to avoid mid summer and the run up to Christmas for obvious reasons.

I set my art challenge in January this year as it felt like a natural time to set goals. New year, new beginning and all that. I decided upon a focus word of ‘Connection’ for this year as I had felt a lack of connection with my art practice towards the end of last year. I also felt that starting a challenge in January gave psychological motivation, which comes with a new year, and which may be lacking at other times of the year.

WHAT IS YOUR ART CHALLENGE ABOUT?

It is a good idea to understand your motivation for creating or joining an art challenge. What do you want to get out of it?

It could be that you wish to learn about a particular aspect of art such as colour or composition. You may want to work more freely and experiment with different approaches to making art. Your challenge could be drawing , photography or subject focused. It could be that you wish to start working more in sketchbooks

In addition to this you might want to get into a more regular rhythm of creating work, loosen up, find a new direction for your work or connect with an audience on social media. You may even want to undertake a challenge just to see if you can do it.

Knowing your reasons for undertaking this challenge can help both motivate you and help you decide upon tasks to undertake.

I decided to set a personal challenge rather than join one on social media. There were lots of challenges I could have joined on social media, but for me right now they were a bit too prescriptive and at the same time too general.

I decided upon an abstract challenge. I had felt my work heading in that direction for a while but had not had the courage to take the plunge and really explore this, so I set myself a challenge to explore abstraction for 30 days in January.

WORKING WITH CONSTRAINTS

What are your constraints? How much time do you have? What is realistic?

I work for four days in the week in a stressful job and have a family. Consequently, to take part in a challenge is a challenge in itself. However it is really important to me to keep an ongoing connection to my art practice so I find a way.

I settled on a 30 day art challenge, but the length of time you choose will be a personal choice.

At first the temptation is to set something really challenging. You are filled with the same enthusiasm you have when starting a diet or decorating a room and the belief that you can do anything. This is a great energy and you will need it. However, there will be times when this energy wanes and you will not be able to face the mountain of things you have set yourself. I have found the best way to set a challenge is to go for the minimum you can do in the time you have. You will surprise yourself if you achieve more.

For example I decided I would like to explore abstraction in my work. I would do this by creating a piece of artwork, or taking an abstract photograph each day.

This parameter I set myself gave me the option to work for the whole day on an artwork if I had time. It also enabled me to connect with my project by taking a single photograph, if I was at work, or had family commitments. Either way I could connect with my project and not feel like a failure for letting it drop. I have to say that even the minimum of taking a phoitograph felt like a challenge on some days, but it was do-able.

HOW WILL YOU GO ABOUT YOUR ART CHALLENGE?

Just start.

The first piece of work will feel lonely. However, as you add to it day by day, you will see how your project is starting to develop. You will build momentum and gain a sense of direction. If it is your own project trust what you want to do next rather than following a prescriptive list.

Rather than pre-planning a list of things to do, I found having a list of tasks that I could choose from helped me when I was stuck. Some of these tasks were quick and some more involved. What they all had in common was that I didn’t have to think too hard about them. I stuck the list on my wall and some of the tasks were as follows;

• Lay photographs out on the floor to see what connections can be made
• Weave two images together
• Go on a visual research walk taking photographs of things I am drawn to
• Create a video showing part of my process
• Take an abstract photograph
• Visit an exhibition
• Create a digital version of an analog collage
• Create a digital collage in 10 minutes
• Draw on top of an abstract photograph
• Create an analog collage from photographs taken
• Document work created so far

MOTIVATION AND MOMENTUM

I have a book that I record all aspects of my art practice in and on one of the pages I drew up boxes for this particular challenge. Filling the boxes in each day that I connected to my project was really motivational. I could look at this when I didn’t feel things were going well and see that each day I had turned up and done something. This created it’s own sense of achievement and momentum.

Social media can provide a public visual account of your challenge. Posting on instagram or Facebook can engage other people who give you some lovely encouragement to keep going. It can also give some accountability that might be lacking otherwise. A public declaration of what you are doing, makes it harder to give up. You could even create a hashtag making it easier for people to connect or even join your project.

The downside of social media is that you may find yourself doing things in your project that you think will please an audience and not necessarily because they are the best things for your challenge. This is why I tried to present my project as more of a visual diary rather than working to a prompt list.

GO WITH THE FLOW

So what if your project changes direction?

Well I say just let it go where it wants to go. Its good to work with limitations, but even better to learn to trust your natural inclination. If we knew exactly where we were going as artists, we needn’t start the journey, so ending up somewhere unexpected is all part of the fun. I felt that I needed to add figures to my abstract experiments and this has opened up a whole new way of working for me that I can now explore further.

WHEN YOU GET STUCK

I found the times I got stuck in my project were equally when I felt that I had no time and when I was thinking too much. The way I got around this was just to do something with the material I had generated so far. Things like cutting it up and putting it back together or doing something basic but productive such as masking an image in photoshop worked well for me.

At other times I just started playing either on the computer or which paper and scissors and seeing what happened.

The best thing I did however was to go out and take photographs, just paying attention to what I was drawn to. This showed me where my head was at and gave me material to work with for the next few days.

10 TIPS AND REFLECTIONS ON MY OWN ART CHALLENGE

These are some of the things I learnt about how to set an art challenge – Mine lasted 30 days

1. Make it easy to achieve your challenge each day by setting your daily criteria for success to something small.
2. Write a list of possible tasks to choose from so you don’t have to think what to do as well as do it.
3. When you get stuck, make the effort to go out and take photographs / draw. Pay attention to what you notice. This will reinvigorate your project giving you new visual material to work with.
4. Create gaps in your challenge for reflection. You may need a day or two to assess what to do next. Alternatively make your challenge shorter so you have space at the end to reflect.
5. Use social media as a visual diary. It’s lovely to see the progress you are making and to share your process with others.
6. Trying something that doesn’t work, changing direction, or creating something of less quality than you would like is all part of the creative process.
7. Fill in boxes or a chart for each day you interact with your project. It can be really motivational seeing them fill up.
8. There is always a gift in this challenge that you can take back to your main art practice. It may not be obvious straight away, but the lessons will feed in at some point.
9. Be kind to yourself. If you miss a day. You have already done more than you would have, if you hadn’t started.
10. Remember are always further down the creative road at the end of the art challenge than you were at the beginning.

Head over to Instagram to see how the challenge went