Lately I’ve been feeling… less than inspired in my art. It happens to everyone at some point. While I’ve been working on (and completing!) pieces, they’ve frequently been pretty slow going. So I got to thinking about how I can shake things up a bit and get myself back into my enthusiastic, inspired art mindset.

Back in December I wrote a blog post about ways to make time for your art during the holidays and in it, one of the suggestions I made was joining an art challenge. Now, I’ve never actually participated in an art challenge before and I still didn’t really feel like joining an established, current art challenge. I guess I didn’t want the pressure of following what I perceived to be a rigid, predefined challenge (sure, I realize they’re probably Not actually rigid and intimidating—it’s art, after all!).

But when I was digging around in my studio, I ran across a small leather sketchbook that I had forgotten about.  It’s about 3”x4” with a cute, tooled leaf pattern on the cover. So I thought, why not make up my own art challenge?

I confess, I’m not actually fond of sketching and drawing (I’m pretty sure that’s some sort of art sacrilege!). I do have a sketchbook, but I primarily use it to jot down/sketch out rough ideas for future pieces or to work out details of composition. But my sketchbook is definitely not like the ones you see everywhere that are full of gorgeous artwork! And that’s okay—there’s no rule that says you need to draw intricately detailed artwork in your sketchbook.

So, in need of a bit of a change and looking at this cute little leather sketchbook, I decided that I would actually use the sketchbook to… (*gasp*) sketch! It’s tiny, so it’s not intimidating—there are no large, blank pages staring at me, taunting me to put pencil to paper. And I decided that I would use one page per day—just one. If I feel some crazy desire to do more drawing, I’ve always got my regular sketchbook, with its sad, empty pages just waiting for me to show it some love. 

To keep myself accountable, I also decided to post each day’s page on my Instagram account, regardless of whether or not I actually like how the sketch turned out. I’ve included a few of my pages here. Go ahead and follow me on Instagram if you’re curious to see how it progresses (@tamarajaegerfineart).

We’ll see how it goes, and hopefully the challenge of working in a medium I don’t particularly enjoy will help me to look at things in a different way.

What about you? Have you ever joined or invented your own art challenge? How did it go? What other methods do you use to keep or renew your enthusiasm for your art?