Instagram for Artists: Grow Your Following with Daily Drawing Challenges

Instagram for Artists is a short, conversational planning course built around one central premise: a focused daily or weekly drawing challenge, repeated periodically over years, can grow an engaged Instagram following more reliably than random posting. The teacher, a children's book illustrator, frames this entirely through her own account history, from an early weekly bird series in 2015 through multiple rounds of the 100 Day Project, Procreate 30, and Inktober-style challenges. That personal case study is the spine of the course, and it works better as evidence than as a discrete lesson, since the real teaching happens in the shorter middle videos.

The useful content is concentrated in four lessons: Setting Goals, Choosing a Time Frame, Choosing a Theme, and Planning Ahead. Each one delivers a specific, actionable rule rather than a platitude. Setting Goals argues for two to three complementary technical goals per challenge, warning against stacking unrelated skills like Photoshop, Procreate, and Illustrator into one 30-day window. Choosing a Time Frame pushes back on the intuitive idea that longer is more impressive, recommending 7 to 30 days for most people and using a stalled third attempt at the 100 Day Project as a cautionary example. Planning Ahead is the most tactical section, covering pre-written subject lists, advance rough sketching, and supply prep, and it is the section most likely to change how a viewer actually executes a challenge.

The Be Social lesson adds a genuinely concrete engagement tactic: avoid hashtags with more than roughly 500,000 posts, since they are saturated with spam, and instead use narrower project-specific tags. It also stresses commenting with specific, substantive feedback on other artists' posts within the same challenge rather than generic praise, as a way to build reciprocal visibility. These are small tips, but they are the kind of detail that separates a course written by someone who has actually run these projects from one written in the abstract.

Where the course runs thin is depth and range. At 45 minutes across eleven lessons, several videos are only a few minutes of content padded with restated personal anecdotes. There is no discussion of Instagram Reels, video content, or how the platform's shift toward video affects a still-image drawing challenge, which is a significant gap given how much the algorithm has changed since this advice was formed. The bonus lesson, a scroll through past project grids, is visually illustrative of feed cohesion but adds little instructional value beyond what the earlier lessons already stated.

The course is honest about its own limits, repeatedly emphasizing that follower growth here is slow and organic rather than promised or fast, and closing with a reminder that follower counts should not define an artist's sense of worth. That framing is refreshing given the genre, but it also means viewers expecting a specific playbook for algorithm optimization will be disappointed. This is best understood as a planning framework for a recurring personal project, not a marketing course.

What you will learn

• ·How to pick between joining an established challenge (like the 100 Day Project or Inktober) versus launching your own
• ·How to set two to three complementary, technique-focused goals instead of vague or follower-count goals
• ·How to choose a realistic time frame and daily time commitment based on an honest look at your schedule
• ·How to narrow a broad theme into something specific enough to sustain, such as turning Inktober into a themed sub-project
• ·How to plan ahead by pre-writing subject lists, batching rough sketches, and prepping supplies before the challenge starts
• ·How to use hashtag selection and early comment engagement to get discovered without relying on oversaturated tags