At the end of 2021 I was faced with the challenge of how to improve a facet of my artistic skills. I had been experimenting with some animated shorts involving characters and storyboarding. I found it difficult at first to use a tablet for these tasks since I was well-acquainted with physical media, but had limited experience drawing digitally. I have heard it said that everyone has some large number of lousy drawings in them, so the faster you can get the bad ones out, the quicker you can get to the good ones. It was settled. I wanted to get as many bad drawings out of me as possible as quickly as I could, so I decided to draw one thing every day. My only problem was that having done this before, I found it difficult to decide what to draw every day. I had also seen a video about how to become a better artist where the person drew the same thing every day for one year. I wanted to constrain myself, since limitations tend to breed creativity, but I didn’t want it THAT narrow. I chose to draw birds. But I wanted it to be straightforward, so I decided to draw the same type of bird every day for a month. With those guidelines in place, I started in January with crows (I love crows). From there I would decide a few days before the end of the month what to draw next, and moved on to Hawks in February and so on. Since I was posting to social media, I would sometimes ask my followers what bird I should draw next, and got some really great suggestions of things I would have otherwise not have thought to choose such as cranes, herons, and pheasants. Throughout the year not only honed my drawing skills, but also became familiar with the digital tools of the iPad: Procreate and Adobe Fresco. I cultivated a small set of favorite brushes and techniques to the point where I was able to bang out a fairly polished drawing in just about 20-30 minutes on a regular basis. I really saw it pay off in my day job as the need came up for me to draw storyboards for several of our animation projects. Being comfortable with the digital tools and technique made it easy to not have to think too hard about the drawings themselves and focus on the larger concepts like how are we going to communicate the client’s message visually? What framing and focal length will best tell the story? What images will convey the types of feeling and emotion we want to portray? It was an extremely helpful exercise, and I am more than thrilled with the results