The Challenge of a Daily Doodle

Have you ever decided to do one of those 30-day challenges? In 2010, I completed a 365-day challenge to take daily self-portraits. It was really hard to make it to the end of that challenge. There were evenings when I would crawl into bed, very tired, and I’d realize that I had not taken a self-portrait that day. I would drag myself out of bed and take a quite uninspired photo.

I have to admit, after forgetting a few times, I started taking extra pictures to have on hand just in case. (Shhhh – don’t tell anyone!)

A lot of the photos were really fun, and sometimes I would Photoshop something. It was a really great experience. If you’re interested, you can see them all here on Flickr.

Fast forward to 2015, and I decided to do another 365-day challenge. This time, the challenge was daily doodles. And this time around, I decided to include all of my friends to help provide the subject matter. On social media, I asked friends to give me topics. I would usually receive responses from 5-10 people, giving me their ideas, and from those, I compiled a great list of topics. Anytime I ran out of ideas, I would just ask for more.

Well, just like with the self-portraits, it was really hard to keep up with this challenge every single day! Life got in the way, as you can imagine.

In the end, I only drew 280 doodles. But something really wonderful happened throughout the process: my drawing skills improved tremendously! If you compare some of the drawings I made earlier that year with drawings I made towards the end of that year, you can clearly see an improvement.

Drawings #16 and #53: