12 Best Daily Drawing Challenges for Illustrators and People Who Sketch or Draw

Participating in daily drawing challenges is a great way of improving your drawing skills and creativity. Because it can often be hard to come up with new ideas for things to draw, a daily drawing challenge is a helpful alternative to just coming up with something new to draw every day. You will likely also be much more committed to drawing as the challenge makes you draw more often and a greater variety of different subjects than you would normally be able to think of.

This is a list of some of the best daily drawing challenges for you to try out. Daily drawing challenges come in many different forms. Some last for 30 days, some let you pick your own timeframe and others are focussed on specific topics. See what fits best with you by trying them out.

FakeClients Daily Illustration Brief

The FakeClients Daily Illustration Brief is an excellent way to practice illustration for free. To start your daily drawing challenge, sign up on fakeclients.com/dailybrief. Once you've signed up, simply select "Illustration" and click "Start receiving daily briefs". After this, wait until you receive the first prompt in your email inbox and use it as a drawing challenge. You can freely decide for how long you want to continue the daily challenge as you can unsubscribe at any time.

FakeClients Generator

FakeClients.com also features an extensive generator that lets you generate an unlimited number of drawing practice exercises. These exercises are all randomly generated which means that you will receive a new, unique exercise every time you press the 'generate brief'-button. The prompts are written in the form of a client brief as if a potential client asked you to draw something for them. This will also help beginning illustrators practice working for real clients and keeping to their requirements. When you are done using the generator, you can even share your work on the feedback section of FakeClients to get some feedback from other users and showcase your work.

Some Examples of FakeClients Drawing Challenges

Doodle Addicts Daily Drawing Challenges

Doodle Addicts is another well-known place to find some daily drawing challenges. Doodle Addicts is a platform for artists to share their work, and they also have a dedicated section for drawing challenges. The daily challenges can be quite vague, but certainly can be very useful if you are already an experienced illustrator and you know how to deal with complex or odd scenes. Each time they post a drawing challenge, people can upload their work, and a winner for that drawing challenge is picked. It’s also a great place to find some inspiration as you can look up older challenges and view the work that has been submitted and the work that won the challenge.

Inktober Daily Drawing Challenge

If you've been drawing for some time, you likely have heard about Inktober in some way before as it’s one of the most popular daily drawing challenges on the internet and also has a huge following on Instagram. Every year in October, the creator of Inktober will release 31 prompts that are each little a challenge of something you draw that day of the month. The Inktober daily drawing challenges were created by the well-known illustrator Jake Parker and each year thousands of people participate in the challenge using the Inktober hashtag. It is unfortunate that the challenge only happens 31 days per year but be sure to remember this challenge when the month of October is coming up.

Different Drawing Styles Challenge

As someone who is interested in drawing, you probably have a distinct drawing style of your own. If you stay within your own distinct style for a while, it can become hard to draw in different ways as you become less used to other styles of drawing. A great way to get out of being locked into a single style is to try and challenge yourself to draw in different ways. Starting a different drawing styles challenge is a great way for yourself to explore other styles and get more used to drawing in different ways. To start this challenge, simply look up some drawings you like and use them as inspiration to draw in that style. Do this every day and you'll quickly adapt to drawing in all these different styles. You can also share your work using the hashtag #stylechallenge.

MerMay Daily Mermaid Drawing Challenge

Besides the famous Inktober drawing challenge, there are various other drawing challenges that go on for one month and that give you a different prompt every day of that month. The MerMay challenge is one of these challenges. As the name suggests, it takes place every year during the month of May. Every day of the month of May, you, together with all the other participants of the challenge, will be given a different prompt of a mermaid to draw. It's a fun and unique challenge and should be especially fun if you like mermaids. The prompts are quite general though so you could also use them to draw something else if you aren't into mermaids. You can also share your work using the hashtag #mermay.

Smaugust Daily Dragon Drawing Challenge

Another daily drawing challenge that is linked to a specific month of the year is the Smaugust challenge. The challenge has gained quite a bit of popularity and is, just like the MerMay challenge, centered around a specific theme. The Smaugust challenge takes place every day of the month of August and revolves around drawings of dragons. Unlike the Inktober or MerMay challenge, there isn't a website or account that decides on the prompts but there are a few people that create prompt lists that you can use. To find these prompt lists, simply look up the hashtag #smaugust and you'll probably find quite a few of these prompt lists you can use.

Magical March Daily Drawing Challenge

The Magical march daily drawing challenge is quite similar to the way the Smaugust challenge is set up. The challenge is quite popular and a lot of people participate in it but there isn't a central website or account that decides on the list of prompts. Just like with the Smaugust challenge, you can look up the hashtag #magicalmarch to find a prompt list that you like and you can try out drawing according to the prompts during the month of March.

Daily Drawing Challenges on Behance

Another great way to find some new daily drawing challenges is to look on sites like Behance. Here you’ll find many people that have done some of their own drawing challenges and have posted that on Behance. They create a challenge for themselves, most of them lasting about a month, and publish their 31 drawings on their Behance page alongside the challenges itself. You can just use these challenges yourself and even use their drawings as inspiration to start from! After that, you can even post it yourself on Behance and get some publicity from it and that may even inspire other people to do the same. Here is an example of a drawing challenge done by a well-known artist:

Join a Drawing Challenge Group

Doing a daily drawing challenge all by yourself can become quite boring after a while and you might get discouraged. There are some great communities that organize a daily drawing challenge that you will try to keep up with together. The group linked below, for example, will post a reference image every day. People will then try to draw something inspired by the reference image in their own style. The great thing about joining a group also is that users give each other feedback which ultimately improves your work even more and you’ll be more inspired by other people posting their work every day.

Drawing Things Outside

These past daily challenges in this list are great but when you don’t have access to a computer or the internet they aren’t very useful. A daily drawing challenge that is great for practicing drawing and doesn’t need an internet connection to work is to draw everyday objects. When you are sitting inside, challenge yourself every day to look outside and draw the first thing you see when you look outside. This makes you more committed to drawing some objects you never thought about drawing which makes you way better at drawing. Don’t try to be picky when choosing an object too. Things can often be more fun to draw than they initially look like.

Drawing Other People’s Work

If you still can’t come up with new things to draw, another good way to draw some new things is to just look up other people’s work you like or dislike and draw that. Try to make it better if you think it can be improved or just try to match them if they are really good. You shouldn’t make identical copies of people’s work to publish it under your own name later, but if you draw it in your own style or just use the same subject as them, it’s a great practice exercise that may help you develop your own style.