Five Ways to Gamify Your Art Goals

Written By Stephanie Broder

It's the season of New Year Resolutions, but if there’s one thing we’ve heard again and again, it’s that New Year Resolutions don’t work. However, I think they can work as long as we are clever in setting and meeting our goals!

If you are interested in starting the year with some art resolutions, here are five ways you can gamify your art goals for a greater chance of success.

  1. Make a Time Capsule

Art skills are not quantifiable, which can make it difficult to track progress. This is where a Time Capsule can be used. Pick a few skills you want to work on during the year and determine what small art piece you could make to demonstrate those skills. For example, maybe you want to work on figure drawing, so you could do a fifteen or twenty-minute figure study.

Here’s the fun part - you are going to do the same exercise twice. Once at the beginning of the year and once at the end. Write detailed instructions to repeat the exercise on the outside of an envelope. Include your reference image (or where to find it) if you use one. Then, create your starting piece and seal it inside the envelope. Date the envelope with an “Open on” date. When you create your year-end art piece, do not open the envelope until it’s complete! But once you’re ready, compare the two and see your improvements.

Small improvements throughout the year can be hard to spot but seeing the change side-by-side can be really exciting.

2. Focus on Fun

Skill improvement is important to artists. But just as important is creativity. Make sure some of your goals encourage playful and experimental creativity. This will allow for goals that are so fun you will want to meet them!

For example, you may want to try making art with five materials you’ve never used. Or create artwork that only uses recycled or reused materials. Maybe you want to go back to Art School 101 and spend 1-hour making blind contour drawings of items around your house. Or get yourself a cheap sketchbook and fill the entire thing, cover-to-cover, using ONLY markers (or other non-erasable materials!) The possibilities are endless, so just make sure to focus on the process over the product.

3. Get Dice Involved

If you, like me, love Dungeons & Dragons, you may also know the joys of playing with Math Rocks (aka dice). D&D dice come in everything from 4-sided to the most famous 20-sided version, which makes them perfect for random selection.

Get yourself a set of D&D dice (or even a basic 6-sided game die) and use it to control some of your making. For example, you could list 20 colours in a marker or pencil crayon set and 10 different subjects to draw. Roll your D20 three to five times to randomize your colour palette and your D10 once or twice to choose the subject you will draw.

Or you can make a list of 6 character traits and 6 visual character features and roll a D6 (a standard die) twice to pick one of each that you must incorporate in a drawing.

There are so many possible ideas here! If you’re interested in having someone help you create some lists to play with, I am happy to build and share those types of resources for my art coaching clients.

4. Loop In Your Friends

I know it can be tricky to find a community of fellow artists to create with, so here is an alternate task you can do with any friend - whether or not they are an artist!

Give your friend a comic book, artist book, children’s book, etc (preferably one you don’t have totally memorized cover-to-cover). Ask them to find a picture in it to reference and do their best to describe it to you without showing you the reference at any point. Your goal is to recreate what they describe in your style. Feel free to ask your friend questions if they are struggling with descriptive words. For example, is the purple pastel or jewel-toned? What shape are the eyes?

Once you're done the piece you can look at the image your friend described. This is a great way to practice working with a client, illustrating a text, or illustrating a comic script while also being a fun way to goof off with your friends!

5. Reward Yourself for Levelling Up

As a gamer, I must confess that I love the dopamine hit of a level-up. You get the shiny graphics letting you know you’ve improved. Maybe you get better stats, more strength, new items, or more opportunities. I love that feeling!

Well, you can recreate that dopamine hit with your art exercises. While there’s always the obvious choice - buy some new art supplies when you’ve done X number of exercises - I think it’s more clever to think of ways to do this for free.

Here’s my example:

I have hundreds of markers, but at Level 1, I limit myself to using only three colours and black. At Level 2, I get five colours and black. At Level 3, I get seven colours and black, etc.

And just like a video game, levelling up gets harder as I go along.

From Level 1 to Level 2 I just need to draw one marker illustration with my limited palette.

But from Level 2 to Level 3, I need to draw two marker illustrations.

Maybe that pattern holds until I hit the next big milestone - at Level 5, I now need to draw five marker illustrations to level up!

You get the idea - you can use the tools and activities you already like to challenge and reward yourself. My example forces me to: make lots of work (practice!), work with limited colour palettes, and stay committed to a material.

Stephanie Broder
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