A Month of Daily Painting.

STRADA challenge 2022

This September, I participated in the STRADA easel challenge. It is a twice-yearly challenge that requires participants to paint daily from life, and post the painting to social media. I had never participated before, and haven’t had the best track record with monthly challenges in general, but since I’ve really been trying to broaden my skills, I jumped in.

Painting from life means painting a subject that is before you, and not from a photo or screen. I decided to paint small still lifes, since I couldn’t feasibly go out and paint a landscape every day.

So how did it go? I successfully completed my thirty paintings, though it was a bit dicey there a few times. And more valuably, I learned a lot.

STRADA easel challenge take-aways

After thirty days of painting every day, I can say that I learned the following:

Daily practice props up a consistent art practice.

I got very good at setting up my palette and painting area, and very quick at cleaning up afterwards. I also found myself settling into painting far more quickly than I have done in the past.

I prefer painting in the morning or early afternoon.

Pretty consistently, when I had to paint later in the evening, I didn’t enjoy the process. I also felt those paintings were weaker than my other ones.

I need to take a break every now and then!

Painting every single day was a bit much for me. I felt that I would do much better if I could have had a day off from painting each week. Going forward, I’ll aim to keep a daily painting practice but take a rest from painting on every fourth day.

I felt greater dissatisfaction with my paintings the closer I got to a breakthrough.

Every now and then something will click, or I’ll discover some aspect of an artwork that delights me and I’ll develop it more, or I figure out the solution to a problem that has been plaguing me. I think of this as ‘levelling up’.

My ‘level up’ of the Strada challenge came on the second-to-last day. It was then that my vision of still life painting resolved into something that excited me and interested me. But I wouldn’t have gotten there without the twenty-eight paintings that came before it.

The painting that marked my break-though . . . on day 29!

I can only create so much in one day.

Because I prioritised the art challenge, a lot of other goals from September didn’t get done. I stopped painting my garden series. I missed an art competition deadline. I didn’t get all my calendar illustrations finished before the end of the month. These were decisions I made willingly, because I knew I couldn’t do it all. Ideally, if I did this challenge again in future, I’d only do it on a month where I had more time free, and no other priorities.

I enjoy painting books, tea cups, leaves, and twigs.

These were some of my favourite subjects! I tried other things (such as pencils, pens, brass objects) but didn’t find them quite as rewarding. (Except for maybe brass things - those colours are just beautiful).

The hardest bit was posting to social media.

The biggest struggle wasn’t painting every day, it was painting something every day that I was happy to post to social media. For the Strada challenge, you have to post each day to either Instagram or Facebook. (I chose Facebook due to a lower follower count - and so, I hoped, lower pressure.) If you miss a day, you’re out. I think a lot of the (self-imposed) pressure came from always wanting to post my best work, and feeling uncomfortable sharing pieces that just weren’t quite up to the usual standard I set for myself. The truth is, though, that a lot of my daily painting isn’t up to that standard. For every painting I post usually, there’s another one I don’t. So the answer here is probably just to lower my own expectations, and accept all my work isn’t going to be of the same level.

All in all, I found that the challenge pushed me to practice painting subjects I didn’t have a lot of experience with. I had to get more comfortable with painting from life rather than a photo or my own imagination. These were all good things! It also made me tired, cranky, and sick of painting some days, which was less good.

But those last two days really made the whole challenge worth it. I’m excited to follow on with the style explorations I made during the month, and I’m no longer shy of trying to paint from life and observation!

You can see the whole of my STRADA easel challenge on my Facebook page.