A month of creative prompts to fill your sketchbook
While the beginning of the year is an exciting time with many people setting new years resolutions to stop bad and start good habits, it can also be quite overwhelming. And as we all know, this huge push at the beginning of the new year can often lead to burnout and abandonment of our goals. This year, in an attempt to avoid that dreaded cycle I decided to approach things a little differently and only make plans for the month of January, or for me Dry January.
This is my 7th year doing Dry January, a month that I take off from drinking alcohol after the fun and celebrations of the holidays. I enjoy taking this month off and to use the turn of the new year as a time to slow down, reflect, and then shift my focus towards the future. This year, I intentionally slowed down by listening to the audiobook Wintering by Katherine May, a book about the importance of taking time to rest and reset during life’s transitional times. After listening to this book, I took my time to reflect and thought about what I hoped to accomplish with my art in the near future and decided to focus on just making goals for January.
Part of my January goals included intentionally drawing for myself, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, and painting subjects I don’t typically paint. So to start my year off strong, I made a list of 15 drawing prompts very, very loosely inspired by the theme of Dry January. The only expectations I made for myself for this month of Dry January prompts was:
1) Paint 1 prompt roughly every 2 days
2) Stick mainly to watercolor
3) Keep things simple
4) Make sure you enjoy yourself
With that, below are the prompts I used and my interpretations of them. Let me know if you try any of these, or if you have any other good Dry January prompt recommendations.
Cactus
Pyramid
Favorite Beverage Combination
Hibernation
Exploration
Self care
Hygge Essentials
Favorite Winter Drink
Relaxation
Ice
Winter
Winter Animal 1
Winter Animal 2
Beer Bottles
Cocktails
Cactus, and Pyramid: It was great starting with cactus and playing around with a few different shapes, because this felt like a really great way to way to ease into things. I think it is important to identify things you like about each thing you paint, and for my cactus painting I really enjoy how the gold posca pen spikes look, and I enjoyed experimenting with black colored pencil over the posca pen markings. For the pyramid painting the clouds were created by dabbing off parts of painted sky with paper towel and I’m impressed how white they look without added paint. I also like the sand texture I created in the forefront with salt.
Materials Used:
Sketchbook: tumuarta Square Watercolor Journal,140 LB,300 GSM,5.5X5.5", Cotton Paper,Cold Press,24 Sheets
Paintbrushes: Princeton round brushes
Watercolor paint: Winsor Newtown and Holbein watercolor paints
White Paint: Dr. Ph. Martin's Bleedproof White Fine Art Paint
Masking Fluid: Winsor & Newton Watercolor Medium, Art Masking Fluid, 75ml (2.5-oz) bottle Yellow
Gold Posca Pen: Uni Posca 3 Gold Paint Markers
Gold Paint: Holbein Artists Gouache Brilliant Gold
Hibernation, Exploration, and Winter:
These are some of my favorite pieces of the month, I absolutely love how the hibernation painting came out. I would like to draw more animals this year, and this is definitely a great start! For the stars, snowflakes, and titles I used masking fluid and applied it before painting the night sky. To get more information about masking fluid you can read the post I wrote about it here.
Hygge Essentials, and Relaxation:
Another thing I regularly try to avoid drawing is humans, so my relaxation painting is me getting out of my comfort zone. But you can see I also cheated a little by putting the person in a bathtub! Relaxation and the Hygge Essential paintings go hand in hand in my mind, as I live on the East Coast of USA and there is nothing more I enjoy during winter than a hot bath, warm fuzzy socks, and some piping hot soup for dinner. I meant to draw steam coming off the soup and tea kettle but apparently forgot.
Favorite Beverage Combination, Favorite Winter Drink and Ice: Looking back over my paintings from the month of Dry January prompts, I realized I painted a lot of drinks and beverages! I find painting bottles, cups and jars to be tricky because it is hard to get the symmetry just right. Ice is another tricky thing to capture with watercolor, so to make sure I get more experience painting both beverages and ice, I made a bunch of beverage-centered prompts. I absolutely love how the Masala Chai painting came out (even though I think having orange peel in your chai may be controversial) and think I made some solid improvement on portraying ice.
Folk Art Deer and Fox: I was introduced to the Folk Art painting style by Peggy Dean and her Skillshare class: Modern Botanical Folk Art, this was actually my second class ever on Skillshare and got me completely addicted to the platform (click here to read more). I had recently painted a Wintering poster in the folk art style while listening to the Wintering audiobook and was still in the mood to paint in this style. What I love about folk art is the attention to detail with lots of little marks here and there, and the emphasis on symmetry. Again, in attempt to practice painting more animals I choose two animals I thought were “winter-y” having already painted bunnies, bears, and owls.
Beer Bottles and Cocktails:
More beverage painting practice! I had a lot of fun with these two paintings, and even though one of my rules was to keep it simple, I had SO much fun painting all the details of the beer bottles. All of these beer bottles were collected via photos during my travels, except for Ethiopia, I just love Ethiopian food and have had this beer at several Ethiopian restaurants. Do you collect anything that you could paint a collection of?
For my last painting I painted cocktails of different shape and sizes and again I am practicing painting ice in beverages. My favorite part of this painting had to be the fruit accessories! I loved painting the little olives, lemon and lime slices, and am also happy with how the glasses came out.
So that is my Dry January painting prompts and my interpretation of them in 2024. I think it could be fun to revisit these next year and see how my painting skills and style has changed. To paint these prompts you obviously don’t need to be in the month of January or abstaining from alcohol, and really this project had very little to do with either of those things for me. I simply found a lot of joy in the process of taking time to sit down, decide how I wanted to represent the prompt and then enjoying the painting process itself and trying to not care too much about the final product (this one is particularly hard!). I also really enjoyed the fact that I only set out 15, and not 31 prompts. I find challenges that require you to create whole new pieces every day to be difficult- which is maybe something I should work on- but I really enjoyed starting the year at a sustainable pace and I am so pleased at what I have to look back and show for it.
This definitely inspires me to attempt more monthly themed projects like this, and eventually work myself up to a 100-day painting project.
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