The 30-Day Bad Drawing Challenge

Five minutes a day for thirty days. The prompts are deliberately easy, the drawings are supposed to be bad, and missing days is expected rather than a moral failure. That last part is the whole design decision. Most drawing challenges are built for people who already draw, and the streak guilt is precisely what makes everyone else quit on day four and never speak of it again.

The Prompts

Week 1, Things in front of you

1. Your mug
2. Your left hand
3. Whatever is nearest your feet
4. Your breakfast
5. A plant, real or fake
6. Your keys
7. The view from one window

Week 2, From memory

1. Your childhood bedroom
2. A bicycle
3. Your pet, or a pet you wish you had
4. The front of the building you live in
5. A face you know well
6. The last meal someone cooked for you
7. A route you walk often, as a line

Week 3, Feelings and nonsense

1. Your mood as weather
2. A monster made of three things on your desk
3. What Monday looks like
4. An animal that shouldn't exist
5. The inside of your head as a floor plan
6. A machine that fixes one small annoyance
7. Something you're avoiding

Week 4, Constraints

1. Without lifting your pen
2. With your non-dominant hand
3. In under fifteen seconds
4. Using only straight lines
5. Without looking at the page
6. The same thing five times, faster each time
7. As small as you can manage

The last two

1. Redraw day 1 and put them side by side
2. Draw whatever you want

The Rules

There is one: draw badly on purpose.

If a drawing takes more than five minutes, you have misunderstood the assignment. If you miss four days, restart on the day you are actually on, not the day you fell off. If you hate one, skip it and move on with your life.

Nobody is scoring this. The only measurable outcome is thirty drawings existing that otherwise would not. That is the whole win condition.

Why Day 29 Is the Point

Redrawing day 1 at the end is the only part of this that reliably surprises people.

Not because you will have become good in a month. You will not, and that was never the goal. What changes is looseness. The first drawing is usually careful, slow, and slightly frightened of itself. The thirtieth is faster and more confident, and from a distance confidence reads as skill.

Put them side by side and the difference is visible even to you, the hardest and least forgiving audience you will ever draw for.

Join In

DOWNLOAD THE PRINTABLE CALENDAR → free, no account.

START DAY 1 →

Post them, or don't. Tag them #baddrawingchallenge if you want other people's showing up in your feed.

Frequently Asked Questions