community newbie asks

[light_of_summer]

Hi, justcreate folks, I'm new to this community—thanks for being here! I have a question I'm hoping to get your input on: What can you tell me about month-of-creativity kinds of challenge communities, especially for art or photography or short bits of writing, either on Dreamwidth or on dedicated websites that allow uploading or image-linking to DW? I'm currently aware of:

• Inktober (I've done this in the past, but am dubious about repeating it due to controversy)
• November is Art Every Day Month (I've done this in the past, and liked it a lot, but I'm not willing to follow the community onto Facebook)
• Expert Photography Photo Challenge Calender (Prompts look OK, but hashtag for community looks intended to be Instagram-specific)
• ...various others intended for Facebook or Instagram, sigh.

FYI, I do most of my writing for an amateur press association, where community is built into the purpose of the organization. I miss the sense of art community I've had in the past with NiAEDM (and somewhat with both Inktober and local in-person classes that ended with the rise of COVID-19). I have a regular monthly photo group Zoom, but no explicit challenges or central online community associated with it. I occadionally do some crafting, but am not really plugged into a community for that, and am not seeking a challenge for that, right now. I'm currently hungriest for making art in community.

Thanks in advance for any info you can share, and I send you good wishes for your projects of all types!

Here I go, to tackle my next not-very-creative to-do list item. ➡️

Comments

[soc_puppet]

moodthemeinayear is a bit longer-term than you have in mind, but with NaNoWriMo going to shit, I ended up following an impulse to make One Month Mood Theme calendars. So if you want to make a mood theme in just one month, you can use one of those! (Mood Theme in a Year also has a six-week version (18 images total), and will likely have a three-month version (34 images total) starting next year.)

[zenigotchas]

It's so cool that you do writing for a press associsation.

There's some comms for bingo challenges, I've had my eye on one that looks particularly fun! There's also comms for drabbles and short stories for fanfic and, iirc, also original fic, that give out a prompt you use for that week.

I'll try to rack my brain and comb over the comms I remember to see how right I am but those are for writing. Sorry for the vagueness! I'm not super familiar with many comms here (I mostly lurk)

[althea_valara]

communal_creators is running RIGHT NOW. Unfortunately it's too late to sign up for this round, but: it's a creativity challenge open to ALL creative types and runs from September 15th to October 15th. Sometimes a smaller round will happen in the spring. Everyone has been so supportive there!

Most of the writing things I've heard of lately are for longer works and are off Dreamwidth, but here's a few other DW communities that might interest you:

sweetandshort is for short written works and other small creative challenges.

inspiredby posts monthly prompt lists.

common_nature is a community for nature photography.

If you're a fan of the Final Fantasy video game franchise, ffprompts posts monthly prompts. Also, my friends seventhe and lassarina usually run a Final Fantasy Kiss Battle for fic/other works, happening around Valentine's Day in one of their journals.

snowflake_challenge posts a bunch of prompts in January; they are fandom-related, as a way to both celebrate fandom and meet other people. There's also a sunshine_challenge but I'm less familiar with that one.

[silvercat17]

Welcome!

I'm a mod at rainbowfic - we don't have deadlines, but we do have challenges with deadlines irregularly on our discussion community - https://rainbowlounge.dreamwidth.org/tag/mod+post:+challenges. It's mostly focused on writing, but art, crafts, etc are allowed as long as they aren't fanwork. (I need to do more promo to encourage people to do things beyond writing)

You can find a lot of communities on dw_community_promo - challenge communities tend to post there before sign-ups open

I'll second allbingo - it's open to any sort of creations, including writing, art, photography, etc

ushobwri has weekly encouragement for writing

[mekare]

Hi! drawesome is an art community with monthly challenges, for October we just sourced our community prompt list for daily inspiration!
Caveat: it‘s for drawing/painting traditionally or digitally rather than other art forms like collage or linocut or something.
Check it out, we are a really friendly bunch! All challenges stay open indefinitely, so there is no pressure to finish in a particular month.