Creative Challenge 4 Results

I kicked off the year by sharing some goals and dreams for 2015. One of the most important of these was to get back in touch with my artistic roots, which I quickly decided would be much more fun to do with friends. And so began the Creative Challenge— a way for creatives from around the world, to come together online and tackle one artistic project per month.

Challenge #4: Drawing
When I was coming up with challenges for the year, I thought this one was a little bit of a cop out. I’m not a super talented artist, but I’m pretty comfortable drawing, which didn’t make this the most challenging of months. The biggest hurdle (every month) for me has been finding the time to actually complete them. Running my own business has gotten me into the bad habit of doing nothing but work when I’m at home, and these challenges feel like a treat, or an escape— one that I deny myself of too often!

I had to literally take myself outside of my workspace to get started. I gathered up all my art supplies and headed out to the patio, armed with a big bowl of popcorn and a queue full of podcasts. I decided that the subject matter for my drawing would be my three adorable kitties. I had already done a watercolor painting of one of them a few years ago (the lighter one on the right), so I started with my other gal, Miss Toohey (bottom photo).

I personally love drawing on a smaller scale, so I worked on the smaller of my two drawing pads, first sketching out the general shapes on contours of my sweet kitty. I always find this to be the toughest part of drawing because there’s a lot of measuring involved, which I’m not a fan of.

I much prefer the shading and coloring portion, which came next! I had never worked with this set of color pencils before, and maybe I just purchased something that was low-quality but I had kind of a tough time with them. It’s funny that the thing everyone complained about in the watercolor challenge also holds true for colored pencils. You can’t layer the colors on, so you need to leave the parts that you want to remain white blank, and really use black to bring out the shadows. No matter how hard I pressed and how many times I went over it, I couldn’t get that dark, rich color I was hoping for.

In the end, she ended up looking much more like my lighter kitty, as far as coloring goes. The model herself didn’t seem to be a huge fan of the finished product. First she swatted at it.

And then tried to eat it.

If I had started this challenge a little sooner, I would have actually gotten around to drawing the other two munchkins, but I’m happy to have one complete. I may even try something like charcoal next time around, to get that richness I was really hoping for.

I’m thrilled that so many of the Creative Challenge Community members joined me in this challenge. Their projects varied from still life, to illustration to abstract, and I loved seeing the different styles and techniques that were used to create each of them.

I encourage members to “color outside the lines” and explore other artistic mediums outside of our current challenge, or to let one challenge spill into the next. You can spot some additional projects below the drawing submissions, that are equally as gorgeous and creative. I love this community! Check out their stuff:

The fifth challenge (gardening) is already underway! If you’d like to join in on this challenge, or any of the other challenges planned for the year, we would LOVE to have you on board. Until next month…#gocreatives