12 Benefits of Doing a Daily Creative Challenge Like the 100 Day Project
It's that time of year again! The 100 Day Project is back for another year starting on Feb 23, 2025. This is a daily creative challenge I've done many times. I haven't decided if I'll take part this year but, every time I have done it, it's been a big game changer for me as a creative!
Undertaking a daily creativity challenge - whether it's 7 days, 30 days, 100 days or 365 days - has proven to be one of the most beneficial growth tools for me as an artist. But, as the name implies, it's also one of the most challenging!
There are loads of challenges and projects out there for almost every genre of creativity, which is nice if you like to take part as part of a bigger collective of people!
But you can also make up your own challenge as part of your own personal art or creative practice.
Not sure if this is for you? Well, here are some of the incredible benefits I've experienced from doing many daily challenge projects!
One of my earliest 100 Day Projects. You can see a few instances of an early Miss Doodle and the pink typewriter - which went on to be my best selling sticker of all time!
The Benefits of Doing a Daily Creative Challenge
1. Overcoming Perfectionism and Getting Over Yourself
I like the public group challenges because they usually require you to post your work publicly each day and that, my friends, can be terrifying! Nobody gets through a daily challenge without creating work they're unhappy with. But committing to sharing daily is a wonderful way to... to be blunt... get over yourself. When you post each day, you’re forced to get past your own perfectionist tendencies and focus on creating instead.
2. Sharing Your Work
A group or public challenge also strongly encourages you to put your work out there and that is something a lot of creatives struggle with. But if you want to make a living from your work, you need to get comfortable with sharing it with the world.
3. Building A Community
This is one of my favourite benefits from doing daily art challenges. It has always helped me build community around my work. Having a community that’s emotionally connected to me and my art is what gave me the courage to start a business around it. Sharing a bit about my process and the behind the scenes of my work and business are is very powerful ways for me to build connection. Posting daily also helped me grow my social media following
4. Grow Your Skills
Everyone is creative. But hardly any of us are born with artistic SKILLS. Those are learned and refined through practice (in my case... A LOT of practice). Doing something every day builds up your motor skills, your muscle memory, your ability to master new tools and your creative flow - creativity begets creativity!
We've all had those frustrating days where we can't get what's in our head out onto the page, screen, or canvas because our skills just aren't there yet. By practicing every day, you build up both critical muscle memory and develop a skill set that makes it easier for you to physically create the visions in your head - whether they be words, musical notes, stories or images.
One of my later 100 Day Projects where I did 100 Days of food illustrations with Copic Markers. I completed 26 illustrations - one for each letter of the alphabet. To further build community, I used the photography of a number of food bloggers I knew to inspire my illustrations and I polled my social media audiences to decide what food to do for each letter!
5. Develop Your Creative Eye
The more you practice, the more you develop your creative eye. Depending on what your creative niche is, you'll find you start to notice lines, shapes, light, colour, sounds, turns of phrase all around you. You become more in tune with your surroundings and more easily find inspiration.
7. You Simply Get Better
Doing a daily creative challenge or focusing on a daily practice pushes you to get better - there will be a point where you plateau and need to challenge yourself to do something a little bit harder to keep going. By committing to a certain number of days, you'll push past that plateau instead of simply quitting because you feel like you've topped out. Sometimes we need that extra push or commitment to get us to the next level.
8. You Create a Visual or Audio Record of Your Improvement
This has also been one of the bigger benefits for me. Not only are you getting better every day but, you're creating a visual (or written or audio) record of that improvement over a relatively short period of time. You can actually see your progress! This builds your skills AND boosts your confidence. We often don't realize how far we've come until we look back. I find that for this to happen, I usually need to commit to at least 30 days.
9. You Start to Develop a Style
As the challenges moves along, you'll find you start to develop a style and, for even longer challenges, you'll start to refine that style.
A photo from the very first daily creative project I ever did in 2007 - a 365 day photography project.
10. You Build a Body of Work
At the end of your project you’ll have 30, 100, 365 pieces of work that can become the basis of a bigger project, the inspiration for something else, or the basis of products you create for sale (many people who participate in Inktober, MerMay, Huevember, or the 100 Day Project sell prints or the originals of their work).
11. Overcoming Common Creative Roadblock
Two of the biggest roadblocks a lot of us creatives struggle with are perfectionism and being overly precious about our work - to the point that it stops us from putting our work out there or progressing.
Doing a daily challenge can help you break through those roadblocks and get to the other side. Whenever perfectionism starts to creep back in, I'll start a mini challenge for myself to help push it back and it usually works!
12. Learning to Deal with Criticism
As a graphic designer for the past 15 years, one of the biggest things I've had to learn is how to handle criticism. It's just part of my job. I get client feedback on a daily basis and I've had to learn how to handle it. It's not the most fun part of my job but I understand now that it is almost never personal and, often, that feedback results in better work by me. If you choose to embark on a challenge that requires you put your work out to the world, you open yourself up to criticism but you also open yourself up to praise - and creating fans and a community around your work. And that is awesome and wonderful.
To be honest, I've found that very few people are critical - most actually like to cheer you on, which is really great! But constructive criticism can be a gift - so don't ignore it or let it bring you down. It's rarely mean-spirited and it's meant to be helpful. (ignore troll criticism... that's just a negative side effect of the internet and those people don't deserve any of your precious time or energy wasted on them. They're trolling for the sake of trolling).
BONUS: Completing a daily creativity challenge is immensely satisfying.
There are a lot of benefits to doing to a daily creative challenge but one of the best ones is how you feel when you're done!
- just knowing you pushed through and finished something is always satisfying. Never underestimate how the feeling of completing a big project can make you feel very happy and fulfilled!
- to complete a daily challenge means you have to get over perfectionism and that's a big road block for so many of us
- it helps you learn how to be creative every day - that's a skill in it's own right. Inspiration is great but some days, you just have to do the work.
- being able to look back on it years later is a wonderful way to remind yourself of how much you've grown as a creative
- it gives you a body of completed work!
The sheer effort to commit to doing something every single day is sometimes the biggest roadblock to completing the challenge. Some days you'll have to grind it out when you don't feel like it or when it's 11:50 pm. But it is so worth it in the long run!
Have you done a daily creative challenge? What was your biggest takeaway? If you haven't done one, do you think this might be the year that you give it a go?
Pin it for Later
Pin this graphic to your Pinterest boards so you can refer back to it later!
