Reflecting on my 12 a Week Challenge

It's been a week already?

As of the time of writing, 1 week and 30 minutes ago, I set myself a challenge to see if I could draw 12 artworks in one week. It stemmed from thinking back to 2016, when I barely did any art, and decided to challenge myself and draw 12 artworks a year, succeeding with 24. 

Reflecting upon it, now being so productive, I realised I could probably achieve 12 artworks in 1 week, and set about trying to do that. There's just factors one needs to consider when taking on a challenge like this, which I think is something anyone who's tried to take on challenges like exercising or dieting would understand.

Life happens, things pop up that take your attention away from what you set out to do, and it can be hard to stick to a schedule when these distractions pop up. At least with dieting, it's down to deciding to cook and eat the thing you planned to eat, and exercising is trying to find time for a 30 minute walk or cycle every day. These artworks take hours, spread over a day, and it's easy to spend 3 hours working, needing 1 hour to finish off, then getting sidetracked for 5 hours because something in life happens.

It was day 4 or 5 in this challenge that I realised I'd been so sidetracked I hadn't even started drawing 1, so in a way, I'd not even started, and considered not counting the start of this challenge until the time I'd started artwork 1, but that would be cheating. The Rey and Finn sketch I started a few weeks ago, but tweaked and cleaned up the lines, and coloured the entire thing, as a sort of quick fix even though I'd not drawn it from scratch within the week. Sansa was started and finished that day and for that I'm pretty happy with. And the Clara piece, the standing with hands on hips I sketched in 2019, the colouring and the whole underwater section I drew from scratch in a few hours, so that itself makes it all new. There's a piece I've drawn, one of the YCH commissions, I've yet to post here, so in total that brings it to 4 pictures drawn in a week, and I reckon had I been more structured I'd have achieved 12 artworks easily.

So here we go again, this next week, 12 new artworks. Recolours and revamps of old pieces count, so long as they're in the sketch or line stage, so no tweaking existing pieces which aren't 100%, and at least 6 of these I need to draw from scratch. I'll tag these with "12 a week B" so we can keep track of what counts as a new entry. Wish me luck and look forward to the art lol