Blendsday is an effort to encourage and facilitate self-driven practice. A space to explore new techniques, do studies, or just mess around.
Different people thrive under different conditions, and so the idea is to provide a regular framework around which people can participate as much or as little as they like. Some people are inspired by prompts, while others feel unnecessarily constrained and demotivated. Some people benefit from gathering with others at a specific time, and others might not have a schedule that provides consistent free time. Some people are empowered by sharing their work with others, and others are fulfilling a need to create personal works that aren't for sharing.
With that in mind, this page outlines a framework for how regular practice sessions might be structured, along with a schedule/countdown timer that can be customised to suit your or your community's specific needs.
My personal goal for Blendsday was to achieve some regularity of practice time and get familiar with Blender 3.x without the pressure of project work or needing to create finished/polished pieces, but everybody works differently, and anything goes!
- Cheese
Blendsday isn't a single cohesive community, and what structure fits best for any group of participants is likely to depend on those participants' interests and needs.
In the interests of maintaining flexibility and room for individual participants to pursue their own self-driven goals, I recommend avoiding focusing on specific tools or techniques and aiming to provide inspiration rather than prescriptive direction. If a participant wants to explore Grease Pencil, then they'll be able to do that with a hypothetical prompt of "hairdo," but if the prompt is "Grease Pencil" then a participant who wants to practice sculpting will feel excluded.
Historically, I've found value in inviting participants to join a group call, sometimes with someone sharing their screen has created a space where organic discussion and sharing of ideas or assistance could occur. This was always optional though, and a number of participants had positive experiences without engaging in those aspects.
Some ideas for possible activities:
For more activity ideas, see the Resources sections, or enable activities under More options in the Schedule section's customisation form.
Regularity can ease organisational overheads and make it easier for participants to sync back up after missing sessions. That said, different communities will have different needs.
A focus on building routine where it's OK to skip some sessions feels like it leads to healthier/more broadly applicable outcomes compared to fixating on streaks.
Once a week has worked well for me, and requires less attention than trying to remember the First Sunday of the month or keeping track of a fortnightly schedule. The default countdown on this page uses Sundays 00:00 UTC (that is, midnight Sunday morning), which offers the following weekend coverage:
Unfortunately, this leaves the Middle East, East Africa, India, and much of Russia outside of waking hours.
Thankfully, this page is set up to allow custom times to be used! Select your preferred time from the dropdowns below, and click the Go button to update. You may also expand More options and Enable activities if you like. Note that the page URL will be updated as well.
If you are using custom prompt or activity lists, you will need to refresh the page for those to be displayed.
Share as much or as little as you feel comfortable with.
Sharing your journey can encourage reflection and help inspire others. That said, it's totally OK to make personal works that are just for yourself or close friends, and it's definitely healthy to have hobbies that aren't focused on creating "content" to publish.
If you'd like to share with other Blendsday participants, consider using the #blendsday hashtag on social media. If you're hunting for critique of your work, mention that!
Running a community takes a little effort. Here are some resource that may help you run your own Blendsday event.
It's fine to do Blendsday on your own, but if you're looking to share it with others and grow a community, you may find IRC helpful for text chat, Jitsi Meet helpful for voice/video and screen sharing, and Mastodon for less real-time interactions.
Note that these are example spaces and are not maintained or moderated by me.
For Blendsday activities involving prompts, the Next session countdown provides a suggested prompt from a list based on the one I had created for my own Blendsday events. I find that prompts that leave space for interpretation to be most useful, but different activities and communities may have different needs. Feel free to remix or make your own!
Some communities and participants may be interested in something more than a single prompt. To spice things up a little, this page also has the option of replacing or supplementing the weekly prompt with an activity at recurring intervals, which can be enabled in the schedule customisation options. The list included here is comprised of a mix of group activities to explore direct and indirect collaboration, as well as singular activities that are aimed at drawing more subjective expression. Different things resonate with different people, so feel free to remix or make your own!
Blender itself can also be challenging to get up to speed with. In my own experience with Blendsday, newcomers tend to pick Blender up quickly enough when they can observe and ask questions of more experienced users, but everybody learns differently, so here are some resources with a range of styles and formats that may help prospective Blendsday participants get started.
Items marked with a 
indicate web page or text-based resources, while items marked with a 
indicate video resources.
Note: This list is a work-in-progress - suggestions for additions are welcome!
