My First Week of the 100-Day Project, and a New Zine

 

I started the 100-Day Project on an impulse last week, having learned about it just one day before its official start date of February 18, so I didn't spend any time planning a project or even deciding what type of project I would do. Because I had just done a couple of mini collages in my scrap journal, I figured I would keep doing that, with the idea that I would go about it as a kind of study, experimenting with materials and composition, intending to incorporate some drawing and other mark-making into my collages. Which I did, more or less.

But I was also in the midst of finishing up a zine that I had started about a year ago and then set aside because of timeliness. The zine is about the color green (possibly the first in a scattered series of color-themed zines), and when I started it last year, March was upon me already and I could see that it wasn't going to be done in time to peg it to St. Patrick's Day, so I quit working on it with the intention of picking it up again this year. 

About two or three weeks ago, I had a vague recollection about it and was pleased to discover that I had already done several illustrations and written a fair amount of text. I got right back into it and was enjoying some momentum when I stumbled upon the 100-Day Project. So after a couple of days of mini collages, I decided that finishing something I had started before was exactly the sort of thing that this project was made for.

Well, now the Green zine is done and I asked myself, what next? I have other unfinished zines and was considering which one to take up this week, and then remembered that I really needed to focus on a very mundane but essential task: gathering all the relevant financial information for our tax preparer. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of catching up on my bookkeeping. The longer I let that go the more the stress builds up and becomes a real creativity killer. As a kindness to myself, I need to devote some time to it each day before it comes down to crunch time, so that it doesn't become the only thing I can let myself do for however long it takes.

But I feel that such dull necessary tasks can fit nicely with a daily art practice. In fact, it's probably the best way to get such things done.

The organizers of the 100-Day Project encourage participants to spend a small amount of time each day on their projects, like 10 minutes or so, in order to make it sustainable. If it takes too much time, a person is more likely to drop out. So this week, I am going to heed that advice and work on something for just a little bit of time each day, and not try to complete a thing daily. In fact, I am intentionally going to take the whole week to work on one mixed-media composition, filling a page in the same scrap journal where I made my mini collages (four on a page, each completed in one sitting). Or longer, if needed. There is no deadline, after all, there is only doing.

Since I still like the idea of blending collage-making with drawing, and since I have been intrigued by a type of aesthetic scribbling called asemic writing (it looks like writing, but it isn't), I am going to use this week to explore combining that with collage and just see where it leads. I began it this afternoon. Next week, I'll show you how it's coming along.

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.

Magical collage ATCs with security envelopes and a hat trick

 The theme for my little swap group this month was magic and/or secrets. We make artist trading cards (ATCs) based on the theme (or prompts, you could say), and everyone is free to not only interpret it however they like, but to disregard the theme altogether if it's just not working for them or they are jazzed about something else.

I decided to do two different kinds of magic — stage magic and the mystical stuff usually spelled "magick." But I started with a nod to the idea of secrets by using security envelopes for my background.

I often save security envelopes for their interesting patterns — not my original idea, but inspired by other artists who have used them. I included with that collection part of a paper bread bag that had a nice pattern that just kind of went with the envelopes. That's the light brown with blue dots above on the left.

I pasted the strips onto a piece of 100 lb card stock I had cut to 7-1/2" wide by 7" high to make six ATCs. I had drawn the cut lines on the card stock before glueing the strips so I could place them with that in mind.

So here they are all cut and ready for the next step. I wanted to feature a magician with a rabbit that could be pulled out of a hat. I drew the rabbit, then scanned it and shrunk it down (the original drawing was about 6 inches high) and printed seven of them on some white card stock (in case one got damaged when I was cutting them out). 

I searched online for an image of a magician, found a free one that was quite low resolution, so enlarged him to about 600–700% in Photoshop and traced some of the lines to make them sharper before making him the size I wanted, then printed seven of him too, on fairly thin paper that had something else printed on the back. I printed the rabbit on previously printed material as well.

  I sketched a top hat on a scrap of card stock and cut it out to use as a pattern, and traced it onto the back of some decorative paper with a black background and spattered gold and silver metallic splotches on it. I had some shiny gold paper I may have salvaged from an envelope lining (I don't really remember), so used that to make a hat band.

I cut the slit for the rabbit after glueing the hat in place, making two cuts so the slot was about a millimeter wide. Hopefully, you can see that in this detail. (Maybe if you click to enlarge it you will see the black strip by the ears, which is the pocket on the back of the ATC that holds the rabbit.)

The righthand card is the back, as you may have guessed. The vertical rectangle on the right side is the pocket that holds the rabbit, attached along the edge on all sides. On the left, a band of the same paper holds an accordion fold booklet, which you can see more of below.

To represent the other kind of Magick, I did a little searching on Etsy and bought a PDF called "13 Witch's Runes" from a shop called Like It All.  Although she had it nicely set up in narrow columns and two rows on a single page, I tinkered with the format first in Photoshop and then in InDesign so that I could print them at about 3-1/4" high, back to back. To make all the columns the same width, I added one and made a "cover" using assorted glyphs available in my font collection.

I am very aware of how lucky I am to have all of these tools at my disposal!

Here's the skinny booklet opened up: 

I really have no idea how one is supposed to use these symbols and the information about them; perhaps with some sort of oracle deck? I just like the symbolism and the mystique and thought it would be a fun addition to the cards.

By the way, I had to look up "grimoire" — it's a book of magic spells.

It was fun to start with a vision of what I wanted to create — a rabbit that could be pulled out of a hat, with the extra trickery of the creature being bigger than the hat — and then go about making it happen. The six doing the swap this month included myself, so I did make one to keep. I've actually picked it up and pulled my little rabbit out a few times, just because. Maybe I'll do a little research to learn what one is supposed to do with those runes, too. It might even inspire some additional art projects.

 

Making Collage ATCs With a Masterboard a la Margarete Miller

 I swap Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) with a group of friends, and on several occasions some of them have mentioned making their cards by starting with a collage masterboard, which means you collage a larger sheet, then cut it into individual ATCs (2.5" by 3.5"), and add some details to each one.

For some reason, I have long been skeptical of doing that, but finally decided to give it a try when the number of participants grew slightly — from typically 5 or 6 each month to potentially 8 to 10. Not exactly an overwhelming number, you might think, but I actually kind of panicked, because the way I make the cards, one at a time from start to finish, is pretty time-consuming. So I decided to give it a try to see if it would streamline my process.

The technique is championed by Margarete Miller, who is kind of a collage art influencer, in that she sponsors collage art challenges and makes tutorial videos, and her own artwork is very appealing. So I watched her video demonstrating how she goes about making a masterboard, in this case for a set of postcards.

I had initially resisted watching a how-to video on making a collage. I mean, I do know how to cut and paste, duh! But I decided to watch it anyway, just to see if I could pick up any helpful tips, and of course I did. The first thing, which had never occurred to me, was to place the elements without glueing them down yet, then take a photo for reference before beginning to glue. That was kind of a forehead slap for me, and very helpful.

The second thing, which she actually did first, but I didn't appreciate until I had begun to glue things down, is to draw where your cut lines are going to be. This became especially important to me, as I was using a letter-size base (8.5" x 11"), which meant I'd be trimming some away when I cut my ATCs. To avoid placing something I really liked in a spot where maybe I would end up having to trim, I added my cut lines after I had glued a couple of things down.

Our theme for this swap was botanicals, but I wasn't really focused on that as I made my masterboard. I kind of thought of it as a generic background, figuring I would add the botanical part after cutting them. 

I decided to leave off the paper tape measure in the end. It just didn't really work for me.

Cut into ATCs, but not "botanical" yet.

It's hard to say whether making my cards this way actually saved me any time, since I spent a lot of time on each card anyway. But I enjoyed the whole process, and felt that having the common background elements helped the individual cards relate to each other more than sometimes happens when I do them individually from the start. And there's a lot to be said for not starting with a blank "canvas" for each card!

I'm definitely going to use this technique again; in fact, I'm working on a smaller set (6 ATCs) for our March swap, which I'll show you after I finish them.