Weakness is Opportunity for Growth

Written By Christian Inguillo

The Challenge

For years, I’ve wanted to improve my ability to draw portraits. Being able to capture the essence of a person/character while getting the proportions fairly accurate has always been a struggle for me. With October/Inktober coming around the corner, I felt it was a good excuse to finally work on it. For those of you who don’t know what Inktober is, it’s a challenge where you are given a prompt list of what to draw for each day of the month of October. You create a drawing, post it, hashtag it with #inktober and you repeat for each illustration. I decided to create a personal exercise that mimicked that challenge but to help me tackle my problem.

The goals of the challenge:

  • 3 times a week, draw a portrait of an person/character

  • Limit each drawing to one hour

  • Post a drawing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday

I set goals that I thought were obtainable so I wouldn’t get burnt out. If I was motivated to draw more in a week, I wasn’t limited to stopping at 2. And scheduling my posts during the week allowed me to still have my weekends to spend with my wife, decorate for Halloween or any other activities to get my mind off of the chalenge.

What outcomes I hope for:

  • Expanding my knowledge of the facial structure,

  • Staying consistent,

  • Improving my artistic process

The results of my portrait series challenge

After one month of my art challenge, I completed a total of 13 portraits.

While I didn't create a drawing everyday like the normal Inktober/Arttober, I met my goal of illustrating 3 times a week for the entire month. I learned about being consistent through scheduling, built techniques to speed up my drawing process, and how to stop myself from getting hung up that each piece was not completely refined.

Reflection

After going through a more structured plan to approach each drawing, I recognized a lot of bad habits that were slowing my process down.

Practice makes progress. Learning how to breakdown the face and how to adjust at different angles. Once I gained a better idea of basic measurements, spacing and placement, I noticed that my initial sketches took less time. It improved my ability to focus less on hitting the mark on the first try and just make a bunch of marks because I can always refine after.

Move around the canvas. I've noticed that I have a bad habit of focusing on a small area for too long. Although that one section starts to look good, the overall image suffers.

Use a timer. Setting up a deadline help guide me in my process. I became more aware of how I should compose the entire piece, what lines and details to create to develop the portrait. It was more about building layers so that the final sketch felt more complete.

Moving forward


Attempting previous art challenges that had a prompt each day was intimidating and stressful. Giving myself a more manageable goal helped take away some of that pressure and allowed me to reflect on the process and create a system that worked for me.

Challenging myself monthly. I found this challenge helped me grow in so many ways and it's a process I want to continue to push. So my new goal is to create a monthly challenge for myself that I will document. I want to work on not only creating art but sharing how I got there and reflecting on it.

Blocking out time. Setting time limits improved my productivity. I started to use 90 minute uninterrupted sprints to force myself to focus on the task at hand. The short deadlines gave me a sense of purpose in working towards that goal. It also reminded me that it's time to step away and take a break, stand up, and walk around to get the blood moving, keeping my body healthy.

Flexing my path. This is a big personal experiment that I'm sure I'll refine along the way to become more effective. Making sure I stay flexible throughout the process will only help me grow further.

Extending past the challenge


During this challenge, I created 13 illustrations, but also posted consistently because I started utilizing the 90 sprints and preplanned my IG posts using Later. Normally I am struggling to finish up the day of and spending too much time trying to creating the post.

On top of that, it also gave me time to organize my other projects and breaking them down to make each one more manageable.

My productivity is at an all time high because I started developing better habits and a system that allows me to continue growing.This has really motivated me to challenge myself further and extending this growth throughout other aspects of my life. 

Christian Inguillo http://www.inguilloart.com