Anke Creates

# mARTch 2026

✦ the March Art Challenge

F.A.Q

✷ do i have to draw every day? nope — this isn't that kind of challenge! i try to keep things laid back and accessible, so you can skip as many days as you need if you're busy, falling behind, or want a break for any reason! there are 10 main days (marked with a star) to anchor yourself through the month, you can just focus on those if you want!

✷ do i have to make finished art? nope — this challenge is intended for warming up and trying new things more than anything, so quick/unfinished sketches are fine! you can 'polish' your art if you want to, but it's not required at all!

✷ what is the tag for the event? #mARTch or #mARTch2026 this year! i encourage everyone to spend some time in there appreciating what other people are doing during the event!

✷ can you share/promote my entries? unfortunately this year i'm gonna have to take a step back from cataloguing entries - sorryyyy!!! in the past i've shared everything in the tag to my blog @bweirdevents but as the event has grown from a few friends to a few hundred people, it's left me with less and less time to actually participate myself. the blog will remain up as an archive and i'll still try my best to like/interact here and in the discord as much as i can, but my cataloguing days are definitely behind me

✷ can i re-upload your prompt list on another site? i would really prefer people just use the reblog/retweet/share button instead

This is a modern riso ink swatch, but still you find a similar and limited selection of colors to mix with. (Mixing digitally as to emulate the layering of ink riso would be coloring on Multiply, and layering on top of eachother 👉)

If you find some old prints, take a closer look and see if you can tell what colors they used and which ones they layered... a lot of the time you'll find yellow as a base!

Misprints can really reveal what colors were used and where, I love misprints...

Something else I keep in the back of my mind is: how the human eye perceives color on paper vs. a screen. Ink and paint soaks into paper, it bleeds, stains, fades over time, smears, ect... the history of a piece can show in physical wear. What kind of history do you want to emulate? Misprinted? Stained? Kept as clean as possible, but unable to escape the bluing damages of the sun? It's one of my favorite things about making vintage art. Making it imperfect!

You can see the bleed, the wobble of the lines on the rug, the fading, the dirt... beautiful!!

Thinking in terms of traditional-method art while drawing digital can help open avenues to achieving that genuine, vintage look!

YELLOWING!! Digital art is very blue-light based. Cold, clean, flat. But traditional art has warmth to it. Why?

Over time, paper gets yellowed with dust, oil, dirt, and nicotine from cigarettes! So colors got warmer. This makes art look pretty aged, on top of the slight toned papers and hand made/factory made inks they printed with.

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.