As a member of an online art community, there are challenges hosted three times a week that strengthen my artistic versatility. Usually we are given some type of prompt whether it be two words to go off of, or a few pictures as reference. For example, in a random word generator, the host would pick less than three words for us to work from and create a character. For this particular challenge, we used both words and images as a prompt.

Above are the images that we had to work from. In addition to this, the words that we were also supposed to implement were “Great, and Wax”. At first this assortment of concepts and subjects seems very daunting, which it was. However, I did not need to directly use the exact images and words into a character. It could be loosely based off of the culmination of prompts.

After an hours worth of drawing, I was able to conceptualize this piece. Unfortunately, I had a lot of trouble especially making the large fox work and this was my fourth iteration after giving in. Since these challenges are mostly used for generating ideas and concepts rather than finished illustrations, I felt pretty good about what I had. I was able to include “great” as the large-scale fox head, “wax” in the candles that the main character was exporting, and all of the images as well.

Although this was not part of the challenge, I thought it would be fun to further polish what I had into a more realized illustration. So I took an extra 30 minutes or so to add in color, fix up the fox’s design, and clean everything up.

I have found that these challenges are highly beneficial for many reasons. 1, The time/limitations test my creativity and ability to think outside of the box more efficiently. 2, It helps a lot to work collaboratively and give/get feedback from others. 3, The prompts not only encourage me to make a design I would never have thought of, but it simulates a more realistic way of receiving a brief and working on the clock for a client.