Daily prompts to exercise and improve your art skills

There is a truth that goes beyond talent, style, and vision. Practice will take you to higher places, it will help you reach the results you want and it will give you the freedom to let your creativity wander and draw outside the box (pun intended).

The big question now is how to practice your art skills, when, and in which ways. That’s where art prompts come to play, as triggers or excuses to work with a certain skill, medium, or tool, from different perspectives, while understanding that it is not perfection that we are looking for, what we want is growth.

Keep reading and find daily prompts to improve your art skills.

We are not aiming for perfection, our main goal is to make a habit out of your practice. 

What to practice: what art skills do you need to improve

All creatives have different points for improvement. Discipline and practice go hand in hand when it comes to helping you achieve a certain level of mastery of your skills as an artist.

We know, not everything is about skills, creativity plays the biggest role, but practicing your skills allows you to better articulate what you want to present on the blank canvas.

Before we go into actual exercises ask yourself these questions:

• What is my strongest skill?
• When I’m doing a new piece: what do I usually struggle with?
• Is there a new medium or skill I would like to experiment with?

Now let’s create a schedule to make this practice a reality.

Getting ready: the basics of practicing art skills

There are two things that will help you achieve your goal of improving your art skills: time management and accountability.

You need to define a time of the day when you can be fully available to create and practice. Then, you need to establish what amount of time you can dedicate to this on a daily basis. The most important thing here is to be conscious and realistic: how much time can you really invest?

Accountability, in its broader meaning, is all about being responsible, showing up for yourself, or actually, for what you said you were going to do. You can create a calendar to mark each day you were able to meet your deadline and be accountable for your art skills exercises.

With these two things in mind, you can get into action.

And don’t forget to have at hand all your artist tools: this could include a handy sketchbook, pens, markers, different types of paints like watercolors, and all types of brushes, canvases, and even digital art-related tools like a gallery creator software.

Prep your tools and have everything at hand that you’ll need to start your daily practice.

Art prompts to improve your art skills

Here you have a list of daily art prompts. The prompts have the same structure but aim to exercise different and helpful skills.

Read and follow through with these exercises:

Day 1

Warm-up: just like an athlete does, before jumping into your exercises do a quick warm-up. Take 5 minutes of your time to do the next: create a 1-minute doodle without lifting your pencil, pen, marker, etc. At the end of the warm-up, you should have 5 doodles.

Exercise 1: fill up a page with basic shapes. Circles, ovals, cylinders, cones, spheres, triangles, squares. Look around and see what shapes come to mind, then bring them to life on the page.

Exercise 2: turn images into simple forms. Take a dive into an image bank, select a few images and try to translate them into simple shapes. For example, a picture of a hand holding a smartphone could translate into a circle, a rectangle, and a certain number of ovals.

Day 2

Warm-up: let’s increase the velocity. Put your timer on for 5 minutes: every 30 seconds create a free hand doodle.

Exercise: Create a grid on your page or journal. Fill in each box with a different pattern. Each day, change the patterns and your tool: markers, acrylic paint, pencil, and watercolors, try everything at least once. 

Day 3 

Warm-up: Set the timer for 5 minutes. Try to draw an object near you per minute.

Exercise: Understanding light and shadow. Select one object, it should be something you have around the house or studio, and that can be available at any time. During the week, each day, draw the object under different lighting and see how the light reacts to its surface, try to portray these nuances and contrasts, and the shadows that it casts.

Day 4

Warm-up: create a grid in your page or sketchbook. Fill each square with a face, it could be a doodle, it could be realistic or even cartoonish. The important thing is to embrace the challenge and fill the page in 5 minutes.

Exercise: there is a lot you can learn from other artists. We all have an artist or creator we admire and wish to work at their level. Select an artist and every day of this week try to replicate one of their works. This way we are working into levels: first, you are taking a deep dive into understanding their technique. Second, you are breaking the mental roadblock of not being able to achieve such pieces.

Day 5

Warm-up: write it up. Fill in one page with different takes on typography covering the whole alphabet. Here is the trick: each day you’ll only have 5 minutes to go from A to Z.

Exercise: we studied other artists, now is time to go back to YOU. Check your own catalog or portfolio. Each day of this week create a remix of one of your previous art pieces. Any approach works: you can give a second take to an idea you have already developed, try to improve one of your earliest works, finish a sketch and even start something from scratch.

Day 6

Warm-up: go back to the first part of this article. Check your answers about what specific skills you need to practice. Every day of this week, dedicate five minutes to go over that skill over and over again.

Exercise: create artwork in 30 minutes. We are taking this example from artist Luis Palencia who weekly exercised his creativity by creating a full image in 30 minutes. You can set the timer and amount of images to be done, according to your schedule. The important thing is to meet your deadline every day.

Place your creations in digital room mockups and share them on Instagram!

What to do with the product of your art skill practices

Let’s celebrate your achievements. For the past few days, you’ve been working hard on improving different skills with these art prompts and there are many ways to share this process with your followers, colleagues, art lovers, and people that are interested in your work.

Make a small selection of the works you’ve done during the week, take good-quality photographs of the artwork, upload them to ArtPlacer, and select a room mockup (you can choose between different room settings, and styles, even ones with customizable options), and “drag and drop” the pieces. 

Tweak the brightness and lighting. Frame your art. And in a couple of minutes, you’ll have an exquisite design ready to be shared in the precise size for Instagram and other social media channels.