I painted every day for a month

Prints and original paintings for sale! ✨

Jun 01, 2023

Dear friends,

April was a whirlwind! I can’t believe I managed to paint every single day of the month for the PleinAirpril challenge hosted by Warrior Painters.

This post comes to you slightly later than I had hoped as the past few weeks have been a bit intense! I just wrapped up the final art deadline for a client project, so I’ve been resting and playing catch up.

✨ I’ve listed many of the original paintings for sale in my Etsy shop and added new prints to my INPRNT shop if you’re interested!

Why join an art challenge?

I’ve participated in a few art challenges before, but this is the first one where I’ve managed to show up every day. That said, I don’t think it’s necessary to complete a challenge in order to reap the benefits.

Personally, being a perfectionist, I have a tendency to procrastinate and overthink because I set my expectations too high. Challenges have been a great way to get out of my head and move forward on my goals. I owe so much of my artistic growth to them!

Left to right: Inktober 2017, 365-Day Challenge in 2019, PleinAirpril 2020

In 2017, I joined the Inktober art challenge in order to start practicing making finished stylized illustrations beyond the doodles in my sketchbooks. I was used to drawing realism, but I wanted to get into illustration, and this challenge helped me start that journey.
In 2019, I started a 365-day challenge where I would post every day on Instagram. I stopped counting after 72, but it didn’t matter! It was the catalyst that turned my creative practice into a habit. I started experimenting with my process and style, learning how to use gouache and also began to see growth in my audience on Instagram.
In 2020, I joined PleinAirpril for the first time, making 13 paintings in total, which helped me reconnect with my love of painting, become more comfortable with perspective, and overcome my fear of backgrounds.

Understandably, challenges can be intense, but I don’t think they need to be! I strongly believe they can be adjusted to fit your needs and schedule. 15 to 30 mins every day? One sketchbook page a day? Both are great goals. And you definitely don’t have to share your output either.

How it went

Some days, I found a great creative flow, and other days were a total struggle! Looking back, I really love the sense of routine it gave to my day as I showed up every day regardless of how I was feeling.

Goals and intentions

I think having clear goals and intentions helped me stay on track with the challenge. I wanted to pay particular attention to stylizing, simplifying shapes, and creating interesting compositions—but most of all, I wanted to have fun! I chose to do this challenge for my personal growth and to connect with my love of painting, not for external validation via social media likes.

Collecting references

I used my free Figma account to collect reference photos from my camera roll ahead of time. (You could do the same thing with PureRef as well.) It felt extra special painting from my own photos and memories.

My collection of reference photos in a Figma file

Having gathered some images ahead of time made it a lot easier to get started. Each day, I never knew what I would end up painting ahead of time. I would look through my images and choose the one I felt most excited about.

Being too precious

In the beginning, I spent more time than I’d like to admit on these and even painted a few of them twice only to find that my first attempt was always better. I quickly realized I couldn’t be too precious with my paintings if I wanted to post one every day. After all, each day is a new opportunity to try again.

Painting from life

On days I spent with family, I opted to paint from life instead of a photo. I painted from life a total of 5 days. I think those were the most fun and took the least amount of time too because I wasn’t caught up in details as much.

Painting from life is a little scary and unpredictable, but I can already tell it’s immensely valuable. Colours are infinitely more vibrant and intense in real life than a photo could ever capture. There’s an added dimension brought to you by your senses, connecting you to the present moment and the passage of time. I want to challenge myself to do it more often!

My gouache palette

If you’re curious, these are the gouache palettes I used to create my paintings. Many of the pans in the tin on the left are custom mixtures I made myself and all the colours in the palette on the right are straight out of the tube.

Traditional gouache is a lot like watercolour, which can be re-wet once it’s dry, but way more opaque. I usually start out with thinner washes of paint and gradually paint more opaque layers as I build up the image. The key to an opaque application is to blot out any excess water from your brush on a cloth or paper towel and to keep a fresh tube of white paint to mix into lighter colours. I’ve been using dried gouache in this way for many years and I love it.

Sarah Burns Studio has a ton of amazing resources about gouache on her YouTube channel and blog—I highly recommend checking out her content if you’re interested in working with traditional gouache.

Now what?

I always feel a bit lost with my style after painting studies. I love painting so much, but sometimes I worry that my plein air style is too different from my illustration work. I find comfort when people tell me they can see the visual patterns between the two. Sometimes it’s not obvious to us in our own work, but others can see they were made by the same artist. The visual language I picked up (like the ways I depicted skies or trees) and the knowledge I learned from my studies will surely seep into my commercial work, subconsciously or deliberately.

It felt really fulfilling to show up consistently to make art. It has me thinking about how I can bring these principles into my daily routine in a sustainable way. If I could sum up my learnings from this experience it would be the importance of allowing myself the time and space free of expectations, not being too precious, and trusting that through the volume of work, there will most definitely be gems and a-ha moments.

I’ve listed a selection of my original painting for sale in my Etsy shop!

Shop Original Paintings

Many of the plein air paintings I made are also now available as prints in my INPRNT shop. If there’s a particular piece you don’t see listed that you’d like me to add, just let me know!

Shop Prints