Summer Art Marathon
31 Days of Improving Your Art
A project designed to establish a daily creative practice, bring your ideas into reality, and make some artistic friends along the way.
This Summer we will do 31 or 62 days of flexing our creative muscles in a project of your designing, supported by a community of like minded artists.
Do you have a project that you've been dying to make?
Have you always wanted learn watercolor landscape painting?
Learn how to draw botanical illustrations?
Use up all those collage pieces you've been collecting for years?
Crochet enough granny squares to make a blanket?
The Summer Art Marathon is for you!
Here's how it works:
The Summer Art Marathon begins June 1st. Each day of the marathon you will complete an drawing, a painting, a comic, a piece of a cross stitch, a digital rendering, or something else that relates to your core Project.
First, Choose your difficulty:
Easy: 30 days, 1 month Choose to start June 1st, July 1st, or August 1st
Medium: 61 days, 2 months June & July or July & August
Hard: 92 days, 3 months All summer long
Second, Choose your Project:
When considering a Project for SAM, think about something that will take you an entire summer to complete. Think about skills you want to develop, stories you want to create, and what you might do with the project once it’s all done. Need help? Join the discord and ask other participants!
When you sign up for the Summer Art Marathon, you will fill out this short form:
Project title:
Description & goals:
Materials:
What you'll make each day:
Easy, Medium, or Hard:
Social link:
Stephanie’s 2024 Marathon Project:
Project title: 62 Transcriptions
Description & goals: Small copies of masterworks in a 4x6 inch format or smaller. I'm trying to improve my composition skills and color attunement by following successful painters before me.
Materials: gauche and oil paint
What you'll make each day: 1 painting a day
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Medium
Social link: @stephaniescott.art
Rules of the Summer Art Marathon:
Make something every day that is related to your project.
Every day of the marathon, take a picture of what you made and post it to the Summer Art Marathon discord. This is where the community lives and will be supporting each other.
If you would rather post to Instagram or not post at all, that’s fine, but you won’t get the full community experience.
After you posted your piece, comment something encouraging on someone else’s work.
No days off!
If you do miss more than one day, don't try to catch up. You'll have a better chance of successfully completing the marathon if you consider the past missed days as void and continue on with the current day. For example:
Stevie completes days 1-4, but misses days 5-8. On day 9 she restarts her marathon momentum and completes day 9's work. The past is void and there is no "Catching Up" to do.
You can go up in difficulty, but not down. For example: Easy to Medium is ok, Medium to Easy isn’t. This is a commitment!
On the first two days of each month you can change your project, but once we reach day 3, you are committed to that.
Tips for a successful marathon:
Don't miss more than one day in a row.
Choose a project that can be completed within an hour each day. Things that take longer than that tend to get abandoned pretty quick.
Invite a friend to do it with you, accountability buddies dramatically boost your success
Always post what you've worked on each day, ‘complete’ or not.
Write your end goal down somewhere where you can see it every day.
Get your materials ready before the marathon starts.
For example: I’ll need to find 62 master paintings for my project before July 1st
Schedule time each day to work on your Summer Art Marathon and block it out in your calendar.
Turn on notifications for the discord. Getting reminders for what other people are doing will help boost your motivation once the honeymoon period is over.
Lastly, there is no failing. If you sign up and only get 15 days of practice done, that’s 15 days more progress you’ve made than you would have without signing up for the Marathon. Win!
I’m so excited to make art with you this summer! Let’s learn new skills, bring our ideas to life, and geek out about art together! See you at The Arts and Crafts Table (Discord!)
The Summer Art Marathon is partially inspired by a project held on LiveJournal from 2009-2018 called ArtSlam. That project was more focused on original character development and illustration, and is now unfortunately abandoned. Miss you nerds!
Have questions about the marathon? Send me an email, a dm on discord, or comment below!