Challenging myself to create every day. How did it go?

In case you don’t follow me on any of my social media accounts I’ll fill you in on this wee challenge that I did throughout April.

With a combination of being in lockdown for most of April and feeling rather uncreative, I decided to set myself a challenge for the entirety of April called April Create Daily, or #AprilCreateDaily. 

I got a little burnt out in March doing March Meet The Maker and I got into a rut of creating for the point of pumping out daily posts for Instagram. So I decided the best thing to fix that is to do another daily posting challenge…

April Create Daily was for me to challenge myself to create something daily for at least 15 minutes. I didn’t have to make finished products, hell I didn’t have to finish anything that entire month if I didn’t want to. I just had to be doing something creative daily and hopefully learning a few new things. I wanted to use April while we were in lockdown to just create anything, whether or not it looked good or had anything to do with what I wanted to create in the future. It was all about getting into a creative routine that I can use in the future to develop actual pieces of work and hopefully get me out of that creative rut I was in.

So, now it’s over…

I created something every day. Minus the 23rd which I let myself off on as it was my birthday and that’s a perfectly good reason obviously 😂. But, every other day of April I made a thing, not necessarily finished the thing but I used my creative juices to create for at least 15 minutes a day all month. 

And do you know what? I want to continue! Most days I went way over 15 minutes as I just wanted to continue what I was working on. I fell into the deep hole of watercolour again, and frankly spent most of my days watercolouring. Did I hope to do lots of different types of creative work at the beginning of April? Yes. But did I really enjoy spending all that time watercolouring? Hell yes! 

I used to do a lot of watercolours back in my early years of University and then I bought my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and all analogue work sort of fell to the back of my mind. So it was really nice this month to fall back into love with it. So much so that I actually bought myself a few new colours and a new brush and palette to convince myself to continue with it. 

Was it worth it?

Yes! A few other mutuals on Instagram actually joined in which was awesome and I found some new people to follow from the challenge. Connecting with other artists who are on the same wavelength as you is just great! 

My only regret is the lack of lettering I’ve been doing. I tried to go into different directions to the usual lettering and illustration work I had been doing so I need to work on the balance. The balance between doing lettering and illustration, and also learning new things and developing other skills. 

If you have any tips on how to balance keeping up your old skills and learning new skills let me know! Plus, if you want to see what I got up to check out my Instagram Story Highlight!

- Sophie

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