I’m always surprised by how much you can do if you set your mind to it. Painting thirty pieces in one month is an awful lot! This year I spend a little more time to prepare this challenge, as I knew it would be hard to combine with a full-time job. In return, I would learn new things about painting though! Let’s review my experience of Plein Airpril 2025 and share my learnings.
What is Plein Airpril?
Plein Airpril is a yearly online challenge hosted by Warrior Painters, a collective of California-based artists organising workshops and classes. Most of its members are working in animation, so the material is geared towards the skills you need for those kind of jobs. As you need a good understanding of light and colour for visual development and background design, plein air painting has been a regular study excercise for artists.
The challenge was held for the first time in 2017 to celebrate Earth Day (22 April). The goal of Plein Airpril is to challenge and engage with plein air artists across the globe and to encourage them to share their artworks—one per day—during the month of April. In previous years there were prizes to be won (the event had sponsors), this year there were painting demos for students enrolled in Warrior Painter classes.
The term plein air is derived from the French en plein air, which means outdoors. Painting outside was relatively unheard of until the impressionists made it their core practice. This was possible though the invention of the paint tube: with premixed paint, oil painting became a lot more portable.
Nowadays it’s never been easier to paint outdoors; look at me working from my Ipad! I feel Warror Painters does prefer working traditionally slightly over digital (there were slightly more demos in traditional media than digital during this year’s challenge), but everything is allowed. There are artists who create whole scenes in Blender for this challenge.
I’ve completed the challenge once before in 2022. For this year, I had a few specific goals in mind to help me complete Plein Airpril while working full time.
The goals
I’ve set two (and a half) goal for this year’s Plein Airpril challenge:
- Limit the time for each painting to around 1 hour
- Try to simplify shapes, textures, etc as much as possible
I also wanted to paint more works traditionally (to be specific: in gouache), but I knew this would be very hard given my little free time. And it was: only four out of thirty were created in gouache, and two in watercolour.
Working digitally has spoiled me: I never had to account for the time it takes to mix colours. Add to that that I’ve only recently picked up gouache again, and the bar was simply set too high. If the goal was to do a painting every week, I believe I could make it work – a daily challenge is yet unfeasible for me.
The other goals, however, felt quite reasonable to me!
The 1-hour limit
One hour per painting quickly turned out to be way too little time. For natural landscapes, I was able to finish them within little more than one hour. These paintings didn’t feel very challenging to me: natural shapes are much more forgiving if you don’t get them exactly right.
Plein Airpril is about trying new things though, so I wanted to do a couple of city scapes too. They proved to be huge time sinks: those paintings took easily 2 to 3 hours per piece and I do admit I worked on most of them over multiple days. These paintings were the main reason I couldn’t keep up posting every day.
I had created a few paintings beforehand, as a backlog for the days I did not manage to finish the piece on time or had other obligations. This worked out great during the first few weeks, but I ran out of spare pieces I the second half of the month. It was exactly then that I started to drift.
As Procreate lets you see how long the file has been open, I can plot all paintings against the time it took to paint them (traditional pieces are guesstimates):
You can see that the gouache paints took the longest, not counting April 23th. But that doesn’t mean digital paintings take less time by rule: twice as many digital paintings passed the two hour mark (8) than staying under the limit (4). On average, I spend a good 1 hour and eleven minutes on each digital painting. For a gouache painting, I needed 2 hours and 45 minutes on average.
I could conclude that one hour is too short for me to finish a painting, though sometimes I can. However, allocating more time for these paintings means I have to get up early or stay awake longer – both things which are not going to make this challenge easier. I believe it is still a good time to strive for, even though I know I won’t always make it.
Simplifying shapes
Luckily, I do feel I succeeded in this goal. I have tried simplifying through leaving out details as well as using texture to suggest detail. Both approaches work for different subjects: The former lends itself well for city scapes and man-made objects, while the second is great for natural landscapes and foliage.
In my newsletter I referred to these approaches as the ‘flat style’ and the ‘scribbly style’, though in the process of painting they only started to become deliberate choices towards the end of the month. Still, I believe it’s great to become more concious of how I’d like to paint my subjects rather than copying what’s in front of me!
Another thing I paid extra attention to in my paintings is edge control: which shapes do stand out clearly and which ones diffuse into each other? Taking this into account, I could create a much better focus into the painting.
The photo reference folder
In order to make the daily painting go as smoothly as possible, I had prepared a folder of thirty photos I could paint if I couldn’t work plein air (which was probably going to be 90% of the days).
It sure was helpful to have a stack of photos to go through, but I didn’t depend on it as much as I thought I would. In fact, a a lot of the paintings I did where of photos I took the same day or a few days back. I believe this adds to the plein air vibe – one of the reasons I love painting plein air is that your subject matter can be super mundane and you can still create a great piece of it.
Still, if I do this challenge next year, I will too prepare photos to paint from. It’s like a safety net: I have photos to fall back upon if I can’t find a nice subject around me.
Lessons learned
Plein Airpril is a tough challenge, but the results are so worth it.
I love it because it focuses solely on self-improvement and the joy of painting outside. Within the framework of regular plein air painting, you can set your own goals and work at your own pace. With 30 daily paintings, everyone will see growth, even the most seasoned professionals. There’s really something to gain for everyone.
I have done the challenge before, but doing it again proved once again that there’s always more to learn. I realise more and more that plein air painting is not so much about depicting what you see, but more using it as input to tell your own story.
Onto Plein Airpril 2026!
