What is the point? Why bother?
These are questions I asked myself in the final weeks of 2025 when I was thinking about this idea. I decided to commit to this drawing challenge to see if I could personally demonstrate the reasons why drawing every day for 365 days is an awesome idea.
- Discipline
Doing anything with consistent discipline is a massively powerful feeling. I knew I wanted to make space for my art every day. I also knew it was easy to bump it down the list past work, parenting, cooking, and keeping the house at a socially acceptable level of cleanliness. Committing to a drawing every day means drawing regardless of whether I have energy or inspiration.
2. Connection
Kirsten Ferguson’s celebrating women campaign showed what a powerful tool social media can be for positive connection. Kirsten “ended up celebrating 757 women from 37 countries and inadvertently created a movement of women around the world celebrating and supporting one another.”
I wanted a way to connect on social media, and I felt fake trying to make jazzy posts about how great I am. Kirsten Ferguson’s example inspired me to use social media and my art as a way to make connections. As I grow more confident, I would love to weave more portraits into my drawings and shine a light on the people around me. Publicly posting my drawings also creates a strong sense of accountability. I have told everyone I am going to do this!
3. Self-Education
I enjoy living regionally and my responsibilities and commitments here make it difficult to pursue a more specialized professional arts education at the moment. And yet I desperately want to hone my skill to the point where I am able to create the pictures I want. I see constant practice as a step towards building skill.
4. Inspiration
David Hockney, Zoe Young, Donald James Waters– so many artists whose work I admire profess to have “always drawn” and seem to produce these fluid realistic natural drawings. I want to make pictures like them, but I have never “just drawn” I have always felt I am crap at it. I just paint. I feel like drawing is the piece of the puzzle I am missing to make my paintings terrific.
5. Portraiture
I really really want to draw people from life, but I am scared. I will do a lot to wiggle out of actually putting in the effort to get the hang of it. I find it quite confronting and a bit too intimate to sit right in front of someone and stare intently at all the parts of them. Declaring my interest in portraiture and needing subjects for 365 drawings will surely help move me closer to trying this.
So these are the things I was looking to get out of this challenge – I am 243 days in – how is it looking so far?
- Discipline
Being able to say I have actually drawn something for 243 days in a row feels incredible. I feel like a real artist, an actual honest to goodness proper artist. When I start to stress about how I will ever produce enough work to make a living in this field I remind myself I have managed to produce 243 drawings already this year on top of part-time work, my son’s foot surgery, parenting and cooking. As far as housework goes, I found a DVD on Margaret Olley’s life which featured her fabulous mess of a house, and I decided that real artists don’t clean.
2. Connection
My drawing posts are not going viral, but it makes me feel a million bucks to a walk down the street and have people I know and some people I don’t know congratulate me or express an interest in what I am doing. IRL connection is happening from doing social media in a way that lines up with who I am.
3. Self-Education
Some days it feels as if I have done 243 drawings and am still about 24300000 away from getting good at this and some days, I notice little things that feel different. I feel like I am becoming braver about just painting what I want even if it’s hard. I am not so worried about if I “can” paint it. I just do it.
4. Inspiration
I’m doing it, I’m doing it!
5. Portraiture
I am running out of days to put off drawing people! The year is past the halfway mark and barreling downhill towards the end. I have made some inroads and started drawing people from photos, I have done a couple of selfies taken with friends and a portrait of my dad. I persist in making self-portraits from life even though I am not very good at it. I am working up the courage to hire a model and start a life drawing group.
After drawing for 243 days in a row, I can say for sure there are a lot of terrific reasons why it’s worth making time for. I think even for someone who is not looking to make a living from art drawing has so much to offer. It is such a fabulous way of stepping out of the stress of whatever has happened during the day.
In “Will it make the boat go faster?” Ben Hunt Davis lists the moticational tactics that the British rowing team used to win gold. One of their tips is to “Make the journey fun. Creating a drawing everyday and posting it on social media is making my journey to becoming a better artist fun! It gives me permision to stop and capture any little thing that fires my imagination. It connects me to people who are intersted in what I am interested in and it lowers my blood pressure!
Have you ever become so absorbed in drawing that an hour passed yet felt like 5 minutes?