On twitter I discovered this awesome idea of the great Noah Bradley, called #21days. Basically it’s about taking 1 hour everyday for three weeks and investing that time into developing your art skills. It’s about forming a habit, and as a small reward for yourself you can post the result of each day’s work onto your social media thing.
I’ve started my 21 days this monday, so the last 4 days I did three master studies (where you basically try to deconstruct and copy a painting of an old master painter, to understand the way he worked) and one portrait.
Day 1: Master study after Norman Rockwell (original obviously on the left)
Day 2: Portrait of Dino after a photograph taken by my talented brother, which you can check out on ramonwenger.com
Day 4: Masterstudy after the great Thomas Moran
The challenge is super fun so far. Personally, when I start out with a thing, I tend to want to go all in and do the best thing ever with it, and sometimes my expectations are so high that I struggle to finish it at all and it ends as an unfinished idea on my hard drive.
With this challenge, I’ve found it way easier to do because you start and finish a single thing every day. And with the timebox of 1 hour it’s easy to start, because instead of sitting down trying to finish one thing which could go late into the night, you sit down for one hour and do whatever you can in this hour. And eventually, it’s probably more productive this way because you’re not wasting time.I could imagine doing this approach for personal projects as well.
I’m sure there are a couple of personal projects that I could finish way faster when having a fixed schedule of one hour each day for three weeks than the approach of doing a lot and then nothing again for some time.
Do you plan to get into the #21days-challenge yourself or did you do it already? Do you have other „hacks“ for personal projects or learning on your own? Or does this approach not work for you at all? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this kind of thing.
