The Saudi Illustrator Who Has Drawn Something Every Day for Four Years

Shahad, known online as @shaa.ill, has drawn something new every single day for over 1,550 days. The day she started this challenge is marked on her website like a birthday - December 22nd, 2021.

For those who don’t draw, finding an apt comparison for this feat is hard. It isn’t the drawing itself that is necessarily difficult; it’s finding inspiration: coming up with something new every single morning, for over four years.

And yet, Shahad, who is based in Saudi Arabia, perseveres. In fact, she only grows stronger with time. In this daily quest for inspiration, she has constructed a world of joy and fantasy through her illustrations; one where plant pots have eyes and pet cats are the main protagonists.

“The challenge wasn’t just drawing every day, it was showing up even if I had no ideas or motivation,” she says. “To wake up and know you still have to create something forced me to rely on discipline instead of inspiration.”

The daily practice has quietly reshaped how Shahad sees the world around her. “When you know that you have to draw something new tomorrow, you’ll constantly be on the lookout for anything to inspire you,” she says. Inspiration, as it turns out, is everywhere once you start looking for it, “even in the smallest, most ordinary things.”

Sometimes, this means inspiration strikes at IKEA, while looking at picture frames. Other times, it's a stranger on the street. "It was fun to look around at people and say to myself, I'll draw your day tomorrow," Shahad says. The resulting series was six illustrations imagining strangers and their days - the one who oversleeps, the one who'd rather stay in bed than go to work, the one getting yelled at by their mom.

Usually, Shahad’s illustrations come in collections, partly shaped by Instagram’s grid of threes. She decides on a theme ahead of time, and for the next six, nine, or 12 days, draws different variations under the theme. “It really depends on what I feel like doing that day,” she says. Her longest collection ran for 24 consecutive days, nearly a full month, a single idea stretched and explored until her vision was complete.

One of these collections was inspired by Ramadan - or rather, by a cat’s Ramadan. In this series, Shahad imagined the month through the eyes of a house cat. While its humans fasted and cooked and dragged themselves back from work, Shahad’s cat spent the holy month sleeping on their tired backs and licking its lips at suhoor.

Shahad visualises the inner world of animals in much of her work, and there is something of a childlike instinct in her illustrations - a sense of play as she depicts the world in its most joyful form. This makes sense too; Shahad has not been drawing not only since 2021, but for her whole life. “I’ve been drawing all my life,” she says. “All kids love to draw, I just never stopped."

This lifelong instinct has taken its current form in her distinct style. Shahad strips figures down to their clearest shapes - readable, graphic, and sympathetic. “Realism is an important basic skill for every artist to develop,” she says, “but after a while you can see the simple shapes behind the complex ones.” To her, what remains once you strip away unnecessary complexities is what truly matters.

Shahad thinks of her illustrations the way others might think of actions: as things that speak louder than words. "You can spend hours talking about how happy or sad you are," she says, "but with art, if you drew a dry cactus crying, that can communicate that the cactus is so sad it can't hold onto the watery tears it needs to survive." To Shahad and her viewers, her illustrations create space to express simple emotions in powerful ways. In this simplicity, viewers can create their own meaning and form their own emotional reaction. “I hope to show an emotion or an idea in a way that can be interpreted in more ways than I anticipate," she explains. The crying cactus was created to depict sadness - but could also become hurt or lonely, depending on who is looking.

That gap between what she puts in and what others find is, for Shahad, the whole point. "I want to show that there are always hidden meanings if you're willing to look for them," she says. Over 1,550 days in, Shahad has no intention of stopping. In fact, she is probably already thinking about tomorrow’s drawing.

To keep up with her daily creations, follow Shahad on Instagram at @shaa.ill.