Weekly Challenge

For most of the last couple years, I haven’t had the time or energy between my full time job and managing my stress around the pandemic to participate in those big month-long communal art challenges like Inktober (or Mermay, or Sketchtember, or… etc). They look fun in the abstract, but drawing the same thing in the same style or medium for an entire month feels like such a boring, grindy way to spend my leisure time!

But they do look like a good way to shake the rust off one’s art process, so my work-around was giving myself a no-pressure weekly challenge each week, starting with quick poses from Posemaniacs. I gave myself a maximum of 30 seconds per pose, but the bulk were 10 seconds, just enough to get the broadest gesture down.

This was the first life drawing exercise I ever did, back as a teenager! Back then, the professor upped the ante by having us walk outside and find a twig on the ground. We used that twig dipped in a cup of ink to draw our first gestures! I still think it was a galaxy brain move on the teacher’s part, a great way to pull the focus away from perfectionist mark-making, shaking us out of our ingrained habits.

… I wasn’t as ascetic as all that for these poses. They’re almost all done with a Pentel Pocket Brush, which is as useful for exacting line work as it is for messy, quick sketches.

All through the rest of my education, quick poses were one of my favorite activities. It’s so energizing! Once the pandemic has fully died down, I'm excited to attend live model workshops. It’s a wonderful game, that race to capture a pose’s essence before the model flits to another position.

Not all of my weekly challenges have been art challenges. I’ve used it as an impetus to declutter, restart my Duolingo streak, and try new recipes, among other things. But for those weeks where I use it to focus on art are particularly wonderful, creating a space for those “Oh, that would be fun” ideas we all have but never seem to have time for.