7 digital art challenges to boost your creativity
Digital art challenges can be a great way to find new inspiration as well as the motivation to draw and paint when you find yourself in a creative rut or aren’t sure how to push your art. They can encourage you to improve your skills and to try new ideas also provide a sense of achievement in your digital painting.
If you’re a beginner or enthusiast, community art challenges can offer a supportive environment, which provides more motivation to practice. And if you’re an established artist, challenges might help you find new directions through experimentation with different styles and mediums.
01. One-brush digital art challenge
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One of the great things about digital painting in software like Photoshop or Procreate is that there’s effectively an infinite number of brushes to choose from. As well as the brushes included in the program, you can make your own or pick up packs created by other artists (we have a guide to the best Procreate brushes).
This luxury of choice can make it tempting to always use lots of brushes, and like with many disciplines, it’s easy for new artists to quickly to worry about tools more than developing skills. Restricting your practice to just one brush can force your to work to improve your skills using the tool by exploring texture, opacity, and pressure control in new ways.
In the example above, the YouTuber Sam Does Arts paints a portrait using only the basic default round brush in Photoshop, proving that you don’t need big fancy brush sets to make digital art.
02. Limited palette digital art challenge
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Similarly, today’s digital art software gives us free rein with colour, but again, adding forced restrictions can have some creative advantages. Using a limited colour palette can be great for mastering colour harmony and creative problem-solving. It also simplifies things and makes it easier for you by narrowing down a choice that can sometimes be overwhelming, encouraging you to focus on form and and composition.
Try picking three to five colours only and complete a digital painting using only these hues. In the Adobe masterclass above, Kyle Webster takes a deep dive into limited palettes, dissecting some examples and demonstrating an easy way to create and utilise a limited palette for digital painting in Photoshop.
03. Speed painting sprints
Speed painting sprints may not sound like a good digital art challenge for beginners. After all, painting in a rush isn’t going to allow you to pause to consider technique and precision. But speed painting can encourage you to stop worrying about perfection and to make creative decisions on the fly, while also helping you master the brush economy you practised in the one-brush challenge above.
And for people who struggle to find time to practice, setting a time limit can be good motivation since you know how long you have to set aside for the challenge. Set a timer for 30 minutes (or 15 if you want more of a challenge) and try to make a complete digital painting from scratch.
In the example above, Steve Elliott completes a piece in 15 minutes in Artrage using the default oil brushes.
04. Paint over a photo
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With digital art software, there are lots of ways that artists can blend photography and digital painting. One challenge is to paint over a photo. You might already often use photos as references for your artwork, but by painting over a photo directly, you no longer need to worry about composition and can focus entirely on your brush work and texturing.
This practice provides a structured reference for accurate shapes and values, while still offering creative freedom to add a personal interpretation by experimenting with colour, values and technique.
Import a reference, and create a new colour layer on top. Squinting may help you to focus on the bigger shapes in the reference image. Once you have you main shapes, you can add details and blending.
The example above is from a photographer, Kate Silvia, who uses the technique to transition from photography to digital painting.
05. Shape prompt digital art challenge
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Another popular digital painting challenge is to start with a random abstract shape or silhouette and to try to turn it into a character, object or landscape. You can write a list of shapes and pick one at random or draw completely random shapes to use.
Draw the shape and then explore what marks you need to make with your brush to turn it into something that’s recognisable as a figurative object. This can help with creative block and encourage you to see things in a different way. You can also try doing this with random doodles rather than identifiable shapes (see our feature on scribble art exercises for some more ideas.
06. 20 art styles challenge
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Struggling to break out of your usual style? You can force yourself to do so with an art variations challenge. Draw the same subject in 20 different styles to push yourself out of your comfort zone.
You could use any character, object or even a self-portrait to use for all your variations. Make sure you decide what you’re going to vary and if you’re going to set any rules for the challenge.
In the example above from Grimmijaggers, the artist paints the same character in the style of different animation studios and IPs, such as Studio Ghibli, South Park, rubber hose animation and more. But there are lots of possible other variation challenges that you can try.
You could keep your own art style but make 20 variations of the subject’s pose, the angle of view, or the lighting in the image. This can be good practice for finding interesting poses and views that work. Other ideas could be to vary the medium used for each of the 20 images, or to experiment with different line weights, color palettes, textures or shapes.
If 20 styles seems like too much, a single style swap art challenge can also be a great way to push yourself to try something different with your digital art. Try to recreate one of your own previous artworks in the style of another artist or style you admire, be it cubism, vaporwave, or ukiyo.
07. Pixel art challenge
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Pixel art emerged out of technological necessity due to the limitations of early computer graphics. Today, it’s usually an artistic choice, but it’s not only for nostalgia. Creating an image using only pixel art tools can be a great digital art challenge for those who normally paint realistic scenes in high resolution.
If you follow very strict pixel art rules and use a small 16×16 or 32×32 canvas size and limited colour palette, the work needs to be very precise, requiring a lot of discipline. Every tiny pixel can make a big difference, so you have to make a lot of small decisions about where each square should go and what colour it should be. It can be an enlightening lesson in economy, detail and composition.
Saultoons (above) created the annual Septembit pixel art challenge, while there’s also a ‘Pixel Maynia’ challenge (in May, naturally).
08. Random word generator art challenge
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If you’re struggling to think of a subject to draw or paint for digital art practice, the random word generator art challenge could be for you. It’s eminently simple. Just go to an online random word generator – there are lots of them, but the simply named Random Word Generator should do the job – generate a word and try to draw it, no matter how weird and abstract it might be.
You could set some additional parameters, such as giving yourself a time limit and limiting yourself to using a single brush. The beauty of the challenge lies in its simplicity and how it forces you to think creatively about how you can interpret a word. It also has the benefit for forcing you to draw – no cheating by changing the word if it’s hard!
A variation could be to generate a series of words to draw (or to animate as in the example above).
For more ideas of digital art challenges, see our pieces on how to break drawing habits and how to draw what you see.
We also have roundups of Procreate tutorials and Photoshop tutorials.