2026 Summer Art Marathon - 92 Days of Improving Your Art
A 30, 61, or 92 day art challenge designed to improve your technical skills, create a daily practice, and build community.
This is a creative challenge that you cannot fail.
Have you ever wanted to learn gouache or acrylic painting?
To finally use the collage or fiber arts materials you’ve been collecting?
Perhaps explore a new medium of visual art in a diligent way, with like-minded artists?
To use your summer expanding your creative knowledge?
Then read on!
Here's how it works:
The Summer Art Marathon begins June 1st. Each day of the marathon you will complete an drawing, a painting, a comic, a piece of a cross stitch, a digital rendering, or something else that relates to your core Project.
First, Choose your difficulty:
Easy: 30 days, 1 month Choose to start June 1st, July 1st, or August 1st
Medium: 61 days, 2 months June & July or July & August
Hard: 92 days, 3 months The full project, all summer.
This challenge is designed for artists who want to take their work seriously.
Most art challenges don’t actually improve your art, this one does.
Second, Choose your Project:
When considering a Project for SAM, think about something that will take you an entire summer to complete and can be done within an hour each day. Consider technical art skills you want to develop, narratives you want to explore, and what you will have accomplished once the project is over.
When you sign up for the Summer Art Marathon, you will fill out this short form on Discord:
Project title:
Description & goals:
Materials:
What you'll make each day:
Easy, Medium, or Hard:
Social link:
Here’s some examples to help you brainstorm:
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Project title: 92 Gouache Mastercopy Transcriptions
Description & goals: I’m a beginner in gouache paint and want to improve my color control. I’ll take a master painting each day and make a 4×6 copy of it, avoiding most details and trying to get the feel of the painting.
Materials: Gouache paint, sketchbook
What you'll make each day: I’ll take a master painting each day and make a 4×6 copy of it, avoiding most details and trying to get the feel of the painting.
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Hard
Social link: @instagram or website
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Project title: 61 Botanical Illustrations
Description & goals: I’ve been growing flowers in my balcony pots and as summer progresses, I’ll paint the same flowers as they bud, bloom, and die. A project about time and growth.
Materials: sketchbook, pens, pencils, watercolors
What you'll make each day: Each day I’ll create one botanical drawing and if i’m feeling it, paint it with watercolor.
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Medium (2 months)
Social link: Website or Instagram
-
Project title: 30 Days of Color
Description & goals: I want to understand the nuances of color better, so each day I’ll pick a color and temperature and create a collage with it. At the end I hope to have a big color wheel!
Materials: Cut and collected paper, magazines, glue
What you'll make each day: One small collage in a triangle format.
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Easy
Social link: Website or Instagram
Stephanie’s 2026 Marathon Project:
Project title: 92 Abstract Geometric Gouache Paintings
Description & goals: My primary goal is to use Gouache as a ‘sketch’ for my bigger oil paintings. Getting more skilled at the medium will let me be faster in my process. I’ll use this opportunity to explore different motifs and experiment with color!
Materials: Gouache, watercolor paper
What you'll make each day: A 4x6 gouache painting, with a 1 hour time limit.
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Hard
Social link: @stephaniescott.art
Rules of the Summer Art Marathon:
Make something every day per the guidelines of your project.
Every day of the marathon, take a picture of what you made and post it to the Summer Art Marathon discord. This is where the community lives and will be supporting each other.
After you posted your piece, comment something encouraging on someone else’s work.
There are no days off!
If you do miss more than one day, don't try to catch up. You'll have a better chance of successfully completing the marathon if you consider the past missed days as ashes and continue on with the current day. For example:
Stevie completes days 1-5, but misses days 6-8. On day 9 she restarts her marathon momentum and completes day 9's work. The past is void and there is no "Catching Up" to do.
You can go up in difficulty, but not down. For example: Easy to Medium is ok, Hard to Easy isn’t. This is a commitment!
On the first two days of each month you can change your project, but once we reach day 3, you are committed to that.
Tips for a successful marathon:
Don't miss more than one day in a row. Missing more than one day leads you to missing LOTS of days. Get back to your challenge as soon as you can.
Choose a project that can be completed within an hour each day. Things that take longer than that tend to get abandoned pretty quick.
Always post what you've worked on each day, ‘complete’ or not. Work in progress is still progress
Write your end goal down somewhere where you can see it every day. Think of SAM as a north star goal, keep your eyes on the prize!
Get your materials ready before the marathon starts.
Schedule time each day to work on your Summer Art Marathon and mark it out in your calendar.
Turn on notifications for the discord. Getting reminders for what other people are doing will help boost your motivation once the honeymoon period is over.
There is no failing.
If you sign up for Easy mode and only get 15 days of practice done, that’s 15 days more progress you’ve made than you would have without signing up for the Marathon. That’s a success, that’s completing SAM.
I’m thrilled that you are thinking about joining the challenge! Check out the discord server, apply to enter, and we will create all summer long!
The Summer Art Marathon is partially inspired by a project held on LiveJournal from 2009-2018 called ArtSlam. That project was more focused on original character development and illustration, and is now unfortunately abandoned.
Have questions about the marathon? Send me an email, a dm on discord, or comment below!
