A couple months back, specifically on March 13th 2019, I started an art challenge that actually went pretty well. This was the #100FeetChallenge for artists. For this challenge, I had to draw 100 feet no matter how long it took.
For starters, I am not really good at drawing feet. To think about it, I don't know if I've ever drawn any human feet at all. I draw a lot of creatures and sometimes draw their feet but they are nothing like human feet.
When I first started drawing the feet I wanted to complete the challenge as soon as possible. This is because I thought feet were boring and I would rather draw something interesting. For the challenge I used one of my favorite websites for poses called Line of Action. The site is really good and it offers a variety of quality pictures to draw from. On the left picture I have feet drawings #1 to #14. The idea for the #100FeetChallenge was to draw one page worth of feet per day. So by looking at the sketches, you can tell that I finished this page quickly. Initially I set the time for 1 minute and my first drawings did not have as much detail due to the lack of time.
On my second day. I set the timer to 5 minutes and was able to draw more detailed feet. Even though it was the second day, I noticed that I was actually not bad at drawing feet. The first day didn't go so well because of the time constriction. But now that I had more time, I was able to pay more attention to the shapes, negative space, and details that made my sketches pop. Check out drawings #15 - #30 on the left. Sketch #30 was the first sketch where I said to myself "Not bad, Not bad...".
By the third day I was paying more attention to having better looking sketches rather than having a bigger quantity of sketches. As you can see on the left in blue ink, I only worked on sketch #31-34 (shown on the left) on the third day. From here and on, I don't quite remember which drawings I did in a particular day. As previously mentioned, the important thing was not the quantity but the quality. From this page I really like sketch #43 and for some weird reason my lady really enjoyed #42.
On my fourth page I was working towards getting better shading (see sketches #46 - #57 on the left). One thing I did not mention before is that I was sketching all of these feet with either a black or blue pen. Any mistakes that I made were not able to be erased and I had to figure out how to still make the sketch look good. For example shading on #51 is kind of weird but I did the best I could. During this page I was also adding shapes and colors to enhance the sketches. With some of them I added a background or an outline.
By the fifth and sixth pages I wad drawing sketches #58-85. I kind of went crazy with the drawings on began bouncing back and forth between both pages. That is why the numbering is kind of weird. While drawing on these two pages I felt comfortable drawing the feet. You can really see a big difference between my first page and these ones. Like said before, I was working on quality, not quantity. If you look close you can see that some of the ink got smeared.
From these two pages I really enjoyed sketch #62, #63, #73, and #74. During this time I was drawing and just having fun with it. After this many sketches I had a better grasp of the foot anatomy which helped me shade it a lot better. This in turn meant that I was sketching more realistic feet. Something I really did't know I could do. Check out feet #84 and #85 and compare them to the first two pages. What a difference huh?
Towards the end of this challenge I just wanted to get it over with but not because I didn't enjoy it. The reason I wanted to finish the challenge was because to some point it became tedious drawing the same thing. Feet. Although I wanted to draw other things I kept away from that because I thought it would make this challenge less valuable. See the whole point of doing the #100FeetChallenge is to not only draw one hundred feet but to learn from it and to also learn to focus.
To the left is the last page of the challenge. I wanted to make this page special as it marked the ending of a great journey. When I first started the challenge I thought it was going to be easy. I thought I would draw one hundred alright looking feet and that was it. I was totally wrong. Not only did I draw the feet but I learned plenty. To honor the challenge I spent extra time working on my last three sketches. Sketch #100 didn't come out all that great but take a look at #98. By far this is one of my top sketches. The shading, the wrinkles, it all adds up to a wonderful sketch. I enjoyed my journey with the #100FeetChallenge and would recommend any artist to try it out. For now I am looking at other art challenges that I can do to better improve my work. For more of my work you can check out my portfolio or the home page for the Instagram feed.