Taking the 30 Day Painting Challenge

30 Things You Didn’t Know About Me

OK, so I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of pod­casts late­ly. I admit I can be late to cer­tain devel­op­ments in tech­nol­o­gy, and I nev­er “got” what all the fuss was about when it came to pod­casts. I mean, I already have audio­books and lots of music playlists on my iPhone and com­put­er. Why did I need to lis­ten to peo­ple yam­mer on about dif­fer­ent things?

Then, one day I had a long dri­ve to an art work­shop, and with three hours of dri­ving time ahead of me, I fig­ured it would be a good idea to lis­ten to a pod­cast or two on, well, art. I did a Google search and dis­cov­ered Artists Help­ing Artists (aka AHA). The host, Leslie Sae­ta, has a dif­fer­ent guest host every month, and every week, they dis­cuss dif­fer­ent top­ics relat­ed to paint­ing tech­niques, prac­ti­cal tips, and the busi­ness of being an artist. Every once in a while, they inter­view var­i­ous well known artists as well. All very inter­est­ing.

But the one top­ic that kept grab­bing me was the 30 Day Paint­ing Chal­lenge. So many times, the hosts talked about how much they gained from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the chal­lenge, like how they grew as artists, how their paint­ings improved, that kind of thing.

I was intrigued. So, I decid­ed to go for it. I’ll start off 2015 by par­tic­i­pat­ing. Every day, I will upload what I paint, whether it’s good or not, because I feel it’s impor­tant to share the artis­tic process and dis­pel the myth that we artists are spe­cial peo­ple who get hit by bolts of inspi­ra­tion light­ning and pro­duce stu­pen­dous works of art that no one else pos­si­bly could. I call bull hock­ey on that. It’s all about work­ing every day, mak­ing mis­takes, learn­ing, improv­ing, being sur­prised, and start­ing the process all over again.

My theme will be “30 Things You Didn’t Know About Me,” which I got from Leslie Sae­ta. A theme will help keep me focused, and this theme will be open enough to allow dis­cov­ery, both on my part and yours.

So, we’ll see what hap­pens. This process will also make me write a blog post every day, which leads to anoth­er goal I have for 2015: blog­ging more reg­u­lar­ly. I fig­ure if I write dai­ly for 30 days, well, blog­ging week­ly after that should be a cinch. Right?

Stay tuned. And please do post your com­ments if you’re about to under­take the chal­lenge or have any­thing else you want to share about paint­ing every day.