30 Faces 30 Days 2026
New years eve, 2025, I fell down the stairs and broke my arm. It’s beginning to be problematic how incredibly fragile I am. Anyway, no portraits were done that year. I was still recovering from my mom’s passing… so I decided not to be too hard on myself. I definitely felt broke at the end of 2024, so the arm was the icing on the cake. But I decided to start again in 2026. 2025 was a hard year as a Latinx person. Seeing people that look like my mother targeted and taken away was heartbreaking. I decided to focus on Latinx faces for this challenge. I am incredibly happy with so many of these faces. Watercolors can be challenging because they will dry so much lighter than they look wet, so getting nice rich darker skin tones wasn’t easy. I learned a ton. I also decided to include patterning in the backgrounds. I wanted each piece to reflect the vibrant colorful culture of my people.
30 Faces 30 Days 2024
I decided for these images I would work on florals while continuing to work on my portraits. Flowers are super hard for me. My brain doesn’t want to draw what it sees, but would rather draw something it thinks it sees… which always turns out awful. But I think I did a nice job with most of these. I also realize that what I actually love painting is animals. As always, I am super proud of some of these - and there are some that I want to immediately delete from the internet. But I am adding them all because one of my number one reasons for doing art challenges is to get over perfectionism so that I can actually improve my art making. I am especially proud of how well I did on all of the teeth! When I was young, I drew everyone with a closed mouth and hands behind their back. Now, all of the images with teeth are my favorites.
30 Faces 30 Days 2023
At the end of 2021, I broke my wrist. I wish I had done something exciting, but I actually was taking a selfie while swinging my big hair around. It was ridiculous. And to make matters worse, after the cast was removed, the tendon in my thumb ruptured, necessitating surgery. It took almost an entire year to heal. I did a few paintings here and there in 2022, but for the most part I rested. I decided I was going to give it a go this January. I was rusty, and had to learn how to hold my pencil and brush a little differently, but I really ended up loving all of the pieces I created. Maybe because I have missed making art so much.
30 Faces 30 Days 2021
This year, I tried to stick with those faces chosen by the application Sketchy. Artists this year tried to render 30 portraits in 30 days using graphite. I have to say, I was a bit rusty at making pencil drawings - but feel like I got the hang of it again. It was super hard not to add a little color, but I am very happy with the progress that I made. Art challenges are not about comparing your work with anyone else - but rather about comparing your art to an earlier version of you.
30 Faces 30 Days 2020
In January of 2020, I decided to do a 30 faces in 30 days challenge to help me improve my skills in portraiture and to break through an artist block I had been having. I always come out of inktober kind of exhausted and find it difficult to regain my motivation. I used faces from the app SKTCHY - which is a really neat application that allows people to upload selfies for artists to draw. It is wonderful because there are a diversity of beautiful and interesting faces to choose from. I would definitely recommend it! So here are my 30 faces. Some were super successful and others were challenging, but I had a ton of fun and it definitely helped me to reconnect with my artistic energy. All pieces are done with pencil and watercolor. Click on see full images.
