Art Challenges: Strategies for Success
At every month of the year, you’ll always find at least one art challenge per month to participate in. The first art challenge that I participated in was the “My Punny Valentine” challenge back in February 2023. In 2024, I took part in art challenges during the months of February, April, May, June, July (partially), August, and October.
I love to participate in art challenges and I usually do them for at least one of the following reasons:
To keep creating and sharing things on Instagram, keeping that algorithm monster happy
To create new work that I can add to my portfolio or sell as a new product somewhere
To either focus on a specific tool or try out a new tool/program to create new designs
You may have a different reason for participating in art challenges but I would encourage you to re-visit or re-think your reasons for wanting to do an art challenge if:
You are only doing art challenges for the post likes
You are trying to get attention and validation from the hosts themselves
You are participating in a challenge just because you feel pressured that everyone else is doing it rather than doing it because you want to and have time to do it
As I’ve gotten used to participating in more and more art challenges, I’ve started to develop a strategy in approaching each of them.
I’ll narrow down my design focus. If the challenge itself doesn’t already dictate this, then I decide WHAT kind of an end product that I want to make - it may be creating a greeting card design, or repeat pattern or a scene illustration or something else but I’ll try to focus on just one of those for all of the prompts in a challenge
I’ll decide on an overall colour palette for my designs. This is something recent that I started to implement and I loved how things turned out. I sometimes end up adding to my colour palette as I design for more prompts but I love that everything just looks more cohesive when the challenge is complete.
I’ll create designs in advance. I love it when you can get an early look at the prompts or when hosts start to post about the challenge at least a couple of weeks before it begins. This lets me prep things in advance - sometimes it’s creating the complete design, sometimes it just getting some sketches done, or sometimes it’s just thinking of an idea. Any little bit that I can do before the challenge officially start is a huge help.
All of the strategies that I listed above are all things that can be added to “The Creative Project Planner” to help you manage each of your designs for an art challenge. Check it out here.
How to choose an art challenge?
As mentioned earlier, there’s usually multiple art challenges going on in any given month during the year so how do you choose one to participate in?
For me, one of the first things that I’ll look at is the number of prompts and the timing between each one.
I love seeing daily prompt challenges but I know me and I know that it probably wouldn’t work for what I like to design. With that being said, you don’t necessarily need to do a design for every daily prompt. I would definitely strive to get all 30 or 31 done and I know that I would definitely feel a bit of burnout towards the end.
Another factor will be the subject matter of the challenge.
I’ll come across a lot of challenges that are either for cute kawaii style of character or very gothic dragon related things and neither of those subjects are my design style. I mean, yes, I do like to push myself to create design for subjects that I don’t gravitate to on my own BUT some subjects matters are just too far out of that zone.
Are there a lot of limiting factors with the challenge? If an art challenge is too narrow or limiting in terms of the method to create a piece of artwork, that will usually turn me off from wanting to participate in it.
Lately, I’ve been coming across challenges that encourage you to create it using only one program. I really dislike this type of challenge. I like the ones where it’s open to any art medium and you can create any type of artwork. Yes, it’s ok to have a challenge where it’s focused on greeting cards or patterns or animated graphics but saying that you can only create those using a specific program just isn’t for me - because there’s so many tools and options out there that let you create a final piece of artwork, why be limited to just one?
How to manage things when the art challenge is underway?
The good thing about planning and/or doing some of the prompts ahead of time is that it makes participating in the art challenge time frame so much easier.
In the past, I have never been able to fully pre-prep designs for all of the prompts ahead of time so I’m usually still creating designs for one or more of the prompts as the challenge is going on.
During the art challenge time frame:
I make sure to post my design in the time frame for the specific prompts. I try to get it up as soon as I can so if I can get it up on one of the first couple of days, great, if not, then I post when I can.
I follow the hosts instructions in terms of how they want to be notified or tagged in the post. Different hosts have different participation instructions, some want you to tag them in the photo itself, others just want the mention in the caption. On another occasion, it was better to share to stories and mention the host and hashtag - just make sure you’re following what the host has set out for rules
I make sure to engage with other participants' posts. What I love about art challenges is that it can be a really great way to get to know fellow artists. I try my best to like and comment on as many posts as I can since a lot will reciprocate and do the same for your posts (not always, but it’s nice when it does happen)
Reaching the end of an art challenge
First of all, if you made it to the end of an art challenge - YAYYY! Be sure to celebrate this win and give yourself a huge applause because this is an amazing accomplishment. Even if you didn’t complete all of the prompts, it is still worth celebrating because at least you tried.
At the end of the entire art challenge - so after I’ve posted my last design for the last prompt of the art challenge - I like to put together a recap of all the designs I made for the art challenge. Lately, this has been in the format of a Reel but you could also do a carousel type of post instead.
If you’d like a tool that will help you during art challenges, then I high recommend purchasing the Creative Project Planner.