I once heard some life advice related to productivity: Make your bed every day.
The goal is that, by completing a simple task each day, you will feel a sense of accomplishment that will carry over into the rest of the day. I hated it. Every single night, I'd go to sleep in that clean, well made bed, and mess it up all over again. Frankly, it was depressing.
Despite the existential dread that daily bed-making engendered in me, the idea behind it was sound. A small but meaningful task, carried out consistently each day, does have positive benefits. While bed-making was not meaningful to me, art is. So, I took the approach of making a full sketch every day. Instead of neat beds that would inevitably get messy over and over again, I would build up a wealth of artwork over time.
Most of my more recent projects have been fully finished digital paintings. While I absolutely love painting, finished pieces generally take a month at a minimum for me to paint. Sketches, on the other hand, can be created daily. This means that, over time, they serve as snapshots of my feelings, stylistic preferences, and growth as an artist. Seeing these changes reflected through my sketches over time is what excites me most about this journey.
I used to do something very similar when I still went to school. I'd dedicate a page of a notebook to consistent sketches, creating sprawling collages by the end of a semester. Recently, I dug up one of these pages, which were a huge inspiration for my starting the daily sketches project:
Conclusion
Thanks for reading! Each daily sketch is listed as a 1 of 1 NFT on Opensea. Check out the daily sketches collection! You can also follow me on Twitter for updates.
Have you ever tried daily sketching? What benefits did it bring you?