30 Day Self Portrait Challenge
30 Day Self Portrait Challenge
Script:
Before we get into the introduction I wanted to thank @AmAuror for the video idea. If you have any ideas on challenges, you want me to do then please leave them in the comments down below. Now, I am someone who never really had an artistic vision. I did a single drawing class in high school and I hated it. I was more drawn to the musical landscape than with anything visual. However, the idea of a thirty-day self-portrait was very interesting and thus I took on the challenge to draw myself every day for thirty days.
[Intro]
You can see the portraits and speed up videos of some of the recordings next to me. The challenge for this was simple. I must draw a self-portrait every day for thirty days. I usually taking off every seventh day of the week as a rest day between work and this YouTube channel. That means I have to draw a total amount of twenty-six drawings. To make this even more interesting, I wanted each day of the challenge to also count as how long I had to do the challenge.
For example, day one I would spend only a minute on the drawing. By the half way point I would have fifteen minutes on the drawing and by the final day I would have thirty-minutes to draw. The reason I did it this way is that I really do not like drawing so this could help ease me into the world. I can say that my idea was right and by slowly increasing how long I did the drawing it helped me grow into it. For the most part.
My feelings on art in general is pretty mixed. I live near Chicago which holds two of the best art museums in the entire world. The Art institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. I’ve been to both of these and numerous other art museums and I never really got the appeal. I think it looks cool but I was never someone who could reflect in a painting. All I ever said was, “That’s cool” and walked away. I am the exact opposite with music with it being the reason to live. If we got rid of all paintings then it wouldn’t matter but if we got rid of all music then civilization wouldn’t exist. At least that’s my view. My lack of understanding in the world of drawings and paintings is the reason why I wanted to do this portrait challenge. I wanted to know what it’s like to draw and in doing so would that lead me to learn to like paintings and drawings at a deeper level.
For the first couple days I was doing okay, just simple pencil drawings for a couple minutes weren’t bad. However, after day nine my hand hurt from using these pencils so I switched to pens. For this challenge I even bought a whole pencil collection with different hardness to make it more dynamic but pen ended up working the best. Waste of ten bucks if you ask me. Like I said previously, I hate drawing and this challenge really brought that out of me. Pretty much every day I wrote that I hate drawing on the sheet as either part of my shirt or another design element.
Over time, I began getting bord of just drawing my face over and over again so on day twelve I told myself I could draw whatever as long as I am in it somewhere. I went from drawing me on a cruise ship to me in Las Vegas as this was around the time we were leaving for that vacation. I don’t think I really liked a single picture I drew. Again, I am someone who doesn’t like drawing or art really so I don’t know if any of this has any deeper meaning. I know people say self portrait show how the artist views themselves but if the drawer doesn’t have any skill, then does the drawing have any meaning?
Doing this challenge did kind of grow some appreciation for drawing in general. One day, while I was drawing, I was listening to a podcast, the comedy button, that was talking about going to the animation program at CalArts. They talked about creating over fifty different self portraits through various mediums to try and get into the school. Then they talked about spending days creating thousands of drawings each with just a little change for an animation. This was all before computer animation was popular so it was done by hand. The suffering and tedium of my drawings really put into perspective of what these guys have to go through. While it didn’t grow my want of drawing it helped frame my perspective on how hard the career path of Animation or painting is. And a lot of people in the field really don’t get the respect that they truly deserve.
Read the rest at jack-jenkins.com.
Tags:
30 Day Challenge, Self Portrait Challenge, Art Challenge, Daily Drawing, Portrait Drawing, Artistic Growth, Drawing Progress, Art Journey, Self Portrait, Daily Art Practice, 30 Day Art Challenge, Drawing Challenge, Creativity Challenge, Art Improvement, Portrait Art, Artistic Challenge, Drawing Every Day, Art Development, Skill Building, Self Portrait Drawing, Art Inspiration, Art Motivation, Drawing Skills, Daily Sketching, Creative Growth, Art Transformation, Drawing Progression, Art Techniques, Personal Growth, Creative Challenge