2025 Summer Art Marathon - 92 Days of Improving Your Art

Welcome to the Summer Art Marathon!

A project designed to establish a daily creative practice, bring your ideas into reality, and make some artistic friends along the way.

This summer we will do 30, 61, or 92 days of flexing our creative muscles in a project of your designing, supported by a community of like minded artists. Starts June 1st!

Do you have a project that you've been dying to make?

Have you always wanted to paint landscapes like a pro?
Learn how to sketch figures from life?
Use the stamps you’ve been collecting for years?
Actually practice drawing in procreate?

The Summer Art Marathon is for you!

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.
Want to get really good at designing quilts, perfecting your live drawing skills, or learn a new digital art program? Keep reading!

Second, Choose your Project:

When considering a Project for SAM, think about something that will take you an entire summer to complete. Think about skills you want to develop, stories you want to create, and what you might do with the project once it’s all done.

When you sign up for the Summer Art Marathon, you will fill out this short form:

Project title:

Description & goals:

Materials:

What you'll make each day:

Easy, Medium, or Hard:

Social link:

Here are some Project examples:

Project title: 92 Character designs
Description & goals: I want to stretch my creative thinking and create wildly different characters for a fantasy story each day.
Materials: ink
What you'll make each day: I’ll doodle a silhouette of a character and then draw it in more detail in my sketchbook
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Hard
Social link: @instagram or website
Project title: 61 Landscape Paintings
Description & goals: I love to paint outside, so I want to take my watercolors plein air painting each day!
Materials: sketchbook, pens, pencils, watercolors
What you'll make each day: Each day I’ll paint one scene from life in my watercolor sketchbook. I’ll keep the size under 9×12 inches
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Medium (2 months)
Social link: Website or Instagram
Project title: 92 Photography Portraits
Description & goals: Portraiture is my weakness when it comes to photography, so to improve that I’ll take a portrait of someone I know every day or a self-portrait if I need to.
Materials: Camera, editing software
What you'll make each day: One photo a day
Easy, Medium, or Hard: Hard
Social link: Website or Instagram

Stephanie’s 2025 Marathon Project:

Project title: Abstract Gouache Tarot Deck

Description & goals: I've been wanting to make my own tarot deck for years, but the process has felt daunting. I'm going to use this marathon to do the sketches for the deck. My goal is to have designs ready so I can make the whole deck into oil paintings over the next few years.

Materials: gauche, pens, pencils, gold leaf

What you'll make each day: Thumbnails and a rough sketch of each of the 78 tarot cards, with 14 days for re-dos if I need it.

Easy, Medium, or Hard: Hard

Social link: @stephaniescott.art

Rules of the Summer Art Marathon:

Make something every day that is related to 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.
- If you would rather post to Instagram or not post at all, that’s fine, but you won’t get the full community experience.
After you posted your piece, comment something encouraging on someone else’s work.
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 void and continue on with the current day. For example:
  - Stevie completes days 1-4, but misses days 5-8. 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.
Choose a project that can be completed within an hour each day. Things that take longer than that tend to get abandoned pretty quick.
Invite a friend to do it with you, accountability buddies dramatically boost your success!
Always post what you've worked on each day, ‘complete’ or not.
Write your end goal down somewhere where you can see it every day.
Get your materials ready before the marathon starts.
- For example: I’ll need to order all my gouache paint and pick up a book on tarot symbolism before June 1st
Schedule time each day to work on your Summer Art Marathon and block 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.

Lastly, 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.

I’m so excited to make art with you this summer! Let’s learn new skills, bring our ideas to life, and geek out about art together! See you at The Arts and Crafts Table (Discord!)

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. Miss you nerds!

Have questions about the marathon? Send me an email, a dm on discord, or comment below!

Host and artist Stephanie Scott breaks down the practicality of the art career with topics including: sustainable creative practices, social media skills, and the mindsets to keep us in the studio.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephaniescott.art/

Website: http://www.stephaniescott.art/brushwork

Music by @winepot https://www.instagram.com/thewinepot/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@stephaniescottart

Podcast Cover photo by Maryna Blumqvist https://instagram.com/picturemaryna