For the month of January I will be participating in the Strada Easel 31 Day Challenge featured on their Facebook page. If you complete all 31 paintings and post them to your Facebook page daily, you will be entered in a drawing to win a Strada Easel.

The rules are simple:

• Enter the contest before January 1st through the Strada Easel Facebook page
• Paint (with your chosen medium) from life every day in January (no painting from photos or imagination)
• Post your art on your own facebook page each day with the hashtag #stradaeasel and the day number
• At the end of the month post a collage of all of the paintings you completed to your facebook page
• Have fun and cross your fingers you win!

If you would like to follow along with my daily progress, I will be posting every day to my Facebook and Instagram. I will also be posting a weekly blog post that will talk more in depth about the challenge and individual paintings.

Why do it?

I’m not going to lie, this is a difficult challenge. Finding subjects each day and creating a decent composition can be just as hard or harder than the painting itself. You can certainly make it easier on yourself by panting small, not concerning yourself about making masterpieces, and planning at least 40 subjects/locations ahead of time.

With that in mind, I can think of four reasons every artist should do this challenge.

• Create a large body of work in a short time
• Rapidly increase your technical skills and speed in your chosen medium
• The personal satisfaction of completing this difficult challenge.
• Establish a daily painting habit.

If you can stick it though to the end, you will reap the rewards. In my own experience, the best work I created last year was made during the challenge and immediately after.

It seems counter intuitive that an emphasis on quantity over quality can lead to quality work, but in the case of painting it’s really true. Just think about completing twelve paintings in a year. In that year you have only had twelve opportunities to work on composition, color mixing, brush work, finishing touches, etc. When you complete thirty paintings in a month, that is thirty opportunities to practice every aspect of completing a painting. At the rate of twelve paintings a year, it would take you two and a half years to achieve the same advancements in skill.

Subjects

There are a few ways to go about this. You can paint an assortment of subjects or you can create a series with a theme. For the Strada Easel challenge, you can paint still lifes, landscapes, portraits, or any combination of the three as long as they’re painted from life. You can’t really go wrong. I just found it easier to figure out what to paint each day when I had a theme to work in.

My plan this year is to do another food series. I enjoy painting foods and the ways to change up a subject are virtually endless. Let us use an apple as example. You can paint the whole apple by itself, multiple apples together, cut it up in a bunch of different ways, eat part of it, wrap it in something, etc.

Still Life Box

Since I plan on painting from life I need a still life box. The main purpose of the box is to control lighting and background.

I made a 1 foot cube light box last year which was way more limiting and difficult to work with than I had anticipated. It required that my subjects fit within that space constraint and I had to get very creative with arrangements and lighting. Since I would like the option to paint larger subjects, I made a much larger box this year.

Lighting

For subject lighting last year I used a penlight flashlight and seriously went through batteries. I have been experimenting with alternate light sources throughout the year and have come up with a desk lamp with a daylight bulb. The light isn’t quite as focused as I would like for intense shadows, but I’ll manage.

For work lighting, I have used photography soft boxes for a few years and can’t recommend them more. They provide very soft, bright, balanced, consistent light. Having consistent lighting will really help you be consistent in color mixing and values.

Surfaces

I suggest buying all of your canvas, panels, or paper ahead of time and prepping the surfaces. Painting every day is hard enough without having to do prep work too. Any work you can eliminate ahead of time will help.

I bought the same 6×6 inch Ampersand Gessoboards I used last year. They come pre-primed and since I don’t usually used toned surfaces there isn’t any prep work on my part. If you prefer a toned surface or need to prime your surfaces, start prepping in the weeks before the challenge starts. This is a good time to experiment with different colors for your toned surface so consider a bright red, orange or black to add variety.

Supplies

Aside from surfaces to paint on, make sure you have plenty of paint and any other supplies like brushes, mediums, and paper towels you may need. Even if you are painting small, you will use a fair amount of paint. I paint in oils, but the contest is open to all painting mediums.

Last year I used a huge quantity of Titanium White and had to replace a couple paintbrushes that had worn down. Also, don’t forget to shop your paint stash. I ended up using almost every random (seldom used) color in my paint box by the end of the challenge. Not because I had to, but because it was fun to experiment with color as I became more proficient at color mixing.

Drying

If you’re working in oils, you need to consider where your paintings will dry. Two weeks into the challenge you’ll be swimming in paintings and if you’re lucky a couple of the first ones will be dry. So it is definitely important to consider where you will store 31 wet paintings while they dry. This is an area where painting small is really useful. I don’t have the wall space to store 31 medium to large size paintings while they dry, but I can devote a shelf.

Last year I stuck a whole bunch of skewers into a shoe box to create a mini drying rack that I will be using again this year. Since I wasn’t worried about paint getting on the skewers, I leaned the paintings forward to prevent dust settling on the wet paint.

Are you also competing in the Strada challenge or your own 30 in 30? I’d love to hear about it. Good luck everyone!