Having a go at the 100-Day Project

 I have seen various artists I follow on Instagram and elsewhere reference the 100-Day Project as a kind of daily art-making practice and have wondered about what that is, exactly, and whether it's something I might like to do. So, yesterday, when I saw that it starts today, Feb. 18, 2024, I looked over the project's website to get a better understanding of what it's about. I really liked how loose and open-ended it is and decided to just jump in. 

For example, I expected the daily prompts to be themes and motifs to include in your artwork, but they're more like messages of inspiration, and guidelines for developing a daily creative practice. In fact, the whole idea is to work on any project you want, not just visual art, as I had originally assumed. And it doesn't matter when you start or stop or whether you actually do it for 100 days. The timeline is just the duration for their newsletter about the project. There's a free version with limited information, and a paid version with more, plus access to the archives. I opted to pay $50 for a one-year subscription because I realize that a lot of time and effort and expense goes into what they're doing, so as long as I can afford it, why not support the project with my dough.

As it happens, I had just been playing around with my scraps left over from making ATCs (artist trading cards) for a group that I exchange them with, and had decided to make mini collages from these tiny bits and scraps in a sketchbook that I had turned into a scrap-collage journal. I penciled a couple of 2-and-a-half-inch squares and decided I would fill in just one of them each day until I used them up or got tired of it or for however long I felt like doing it. It's like I had a two-day head start on the project already.

I usually have a small pile of scraps after making ATCs for our monthly exchanges, which is what led me to start the scrap-collage journal in the first place. I like the bits and pieces of leftover papers and didn't want to just discard them (plus there's figuring out what's recyclable and what isn't), and I really liked the idea of pasting them into a journal for my own amusement with no other end purpose in mind. I've also used junk mail and other found ephemera to fill a page, with lots of text jotted on and around the things, because I'm really a words-and-images person, I just am. Perhaps you noticed?

The 100-Day Project does not have to have an end purpose in mind either, unless you want it to. They offer some suggestions for thinking through your intentions. Why do I want to do this?

• To nurture a daily art practice;

• To improve my skills, especially in combining collage, drawing, and painting. I want to nudge myself a little to combine these techniques more, rather than treating them as separate things, as I have tended to do;

• To play! Not just making art when I need an illustration for something else I'm working on (like a zine or the Useful Calendar), but with no end purpose in mind.

I had also originally included: To get in the habit of sharing my art on Instagram and Facebook more regularly, but then was immediately confronted with my own ambivalence about social media. I prefer sharing things by way of this blog because it feels more expansive and leisurely, and because of what I said already: I'm more of a words-and-images person.

So while I do intend to work on my 100-Day Project as consistently as I can, I plan to only "share" about it occasionally, when I feel like it. To begin with, I'm doing the 2-1/2-inch collages, like those I made on the two days prior to the start of this project, but I'm sure I'll want to change it up as I go along. 

Here's day one, showing one in-progress photo and one of the completed composition.