The 100 Day Project found me at the perfect time. Almost a year into a global pandemic that took my day job and forced me to move back home to live with my parents, I was feeling more lost and without purpose than I ever had before. When I initially decided to move home in July of 2020, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to save money while I figured out my next move. Nashville didn’t really feel like home anymore- most of my friends had moved out of the city and some friendships had ended, my lease was ending, I didn’t have a job, and so it felt like the right time to leave. Like everyone else, I didn’t think the pandemic would last very long and I thought I’d be back on my feet in a matter of months. I could never have anticipated the mental toll moving away from the life I had been building for myself for the past 8 years and back in with my parents would have on me. I’m incredibly lucky to have a family that welcomed me home when I couldn’t afford to live on my own anymore, but within a few months I was aching for the independence that I had before. I felt like I lost a huge part of my identity- I had done a lot of growing up in the years I was away and being back in San Diego made me feel like the lost and insecure kid I was before I left. I had all the time in the world to make art but I could rarely find the motivation to do anything creative, so I spent hours a day in bed watching TikToks to distract myself from the overwhelming feelings of hopelessness, of needing change but not knowing where to start.
I came across a video about the 100 Day Project one evening in January when I was scrolling through TikTok before bed. The rules of this project seemed fairly simple and it sounded like something that could help get me out of the rut I was in. The only requirement was to do something every day for 100 days straight, giving me a foundation to build anything I wanted from it. I knew that I wanted to use this project to get me into a creative routine. My goal was consistency. I wanted to be a regularly practicing artist, something that I couldn’t call myself before without feeling like I was lying. I’ve identified as an artist since I was a little kid, but I’ve never had the consistent practice to go along with that self proclaimed title. Before this project, I was stuck in a cycle of attempting to create something every other week or every few months, riding the high of feeling like I made something great by accident, attempting to create another great thing, getting frustrated that everything I attempted looked bad, accepting that art must not be my thing and I should move on, and then waiting a while before trying again. I didn’t treat art as a practice, I thought that it was a talent that I was supposed to just have naturally. When I wasn’t able to create something I deemed as “great” consistently, I thought that must mean that I’m a fraud. I had a twisted belief that my art was more about luck than it was about skill, and that if I couldn’t easily create something brilliant then I had no business calling myself a real artist.
Okay full disclosure, it has been five months since I wrote the paragraphs above (and since I finished the 100 Day Project). I started this post on May 11th with the intention of using it as the introduction to a book I was going to make of my 100 illustrations. It turns out that getting a book made is incredibly expensive and I have a history of making poor investment choices when it comes to my art so that plan is on hold for the foreseeable future. I rode the high of finishing the project for about a week but then lost a lot of confidence and started to avoid writing about my experience when I found out that I wasn’t going to be able to share my completed work in the way that I wanted to. Rereading the paragraphs I had written before kind of bummed me out! Everything I wrote was true to how I was feeling at the time, and I’m admitting all of this now because I feel I’ve grown a lot in the five months that I’ve successfully avoided this post (thanks in part to Wellbutrin, love you). Instead of deleting everything up there I’ll just insert this rebuttal- by making something every day I was able to find my artistic voice in a way that I hadn’t before, but saying that I wasn’t an artist before this project because I wasn’t making art regularly is a little too harsh. I think I was going to write something like that back when I first began this post, but I didn’t really believe it back then. I could have written that in the end I learned that I was an artist all along but deep down what I really thought was, “Okay cool, I made something every day for the past one hundred days, thus proving to me and everyone else that I am a Real Artist.” When a week had passed and I hadn’t made anything new, I went right back to thinking I‘m a failure at keeping up the identity. It’s an ongoing process of unlearning the lie that social media taught me- if you’re not posting every day you’re not going to be a successful artist and your work will not be seen by anyone at all. I’ve gotten better at being realistic- just because I didn’t finish something cool today doesn’t mean I’ve been stripped of my right to call myself an artist. I still slip up sometimes and have to remind myself of this, but I’m getting better at rooting for myself as much as I root for other artists I admire. I decided to put my art on hold recently to focus on refining my design portfolio, updating my website, and applying to countless design jobs in hopes of getting some corporate industry experience for the first time. I haven’t made a new illustration to post on Instagram in weeks but I know I’m still an artist, and that’s on personal growth, baby.
Anyway, I began the 100 Day Project on the 31st of January and the project guidelines I created for myself were pretty simple- I had a color palette consisting of six colors, with black being at the forefront of every piece (don’t even talk to me about black not technically being a color because I already know that but for simplicity’s sake I’m considering it a color right now). There weren’t any other guidelines, I basically just wanted to continue creating illustrations in the style that I had been before so that I could master my artistic voice and have a large body of work that reflected that.
The art movement that I attribute a lot of my inspiration to is Suprematism, a Russian art movement founded by artist Kazimir Malevich in the early 1900’s. In this case, the term suprematism refers to an abstract art based upon "the supremacy of pure artistic feeling" rather than on the visual depiction of objects. Malevich transformed the ideas of the Cubism and Futurism movements which were both popular at the time and turned them into something much more radical- something that was non-representational. This was completely revolutionary to the world of art. Before the introduction of abstraction, art traditionally had a clear purpose- whether it was to portray a historic event, to document the beauty of a landscape, to illustrate important figures of a certain time through portrait, or to comment on a political or social issue. Malevich argued that a work of art didn’t have to represent something in order to be regarded as a work of art. He looked at the visual components of a piece as forms that were in supremacy over nature. They were in complete abstraction and purely aesthetic.
Sometimes a piece of mine ends up looking like something representational, but it’s almost never intentional. I don’t have a plan or a blueprint of what I want the finished piece to look like before I begin my creative process. I play around with shapes and lines without sketching out ideas beforehand. There was a clear deadline for each piece during the 100 Day Project (24 hrs), and so this approach to creating got to be a bit stressful at times. It was a fun kind of stress, though, and I think the point of the project (at least for me) was not to have a plan anyway. The project really challenged my perfectionism, too. A lot of times it would get to be almost midnight and I still hadn’t made something that I was totally happy with to post the next day, but the deadline forced me to be content with what I had made (a perfectly good piece) and I would end up getting a good response on Instagram regardless of how I personally felt about my work. The creative process felt easier and more natural over time, mostly because I just decided to start trusting my talents instead of worrying about whether a piece was absolutely perfect.
If you look through all the illustrations in the project (see below), I think you might be able to tell when I started to get a little more experimental with the color palette. I started out by only displaying the colors in either squares or circles, an aesthetic choice that I was happy with for most of the duration of the project. It became a fun challenge to try to utilize the squares and circles in different ways with each new piece. Later on, I decided to use more organic shapes with the colors, making them more of a focal point rather than an accent piece of the illustration.
The 100 Day Project was hands down one of the most memorable and rewarding creative projects I have ever participated in. It gave me the opportunity to prove to myself that I could commit to a long-term project and it taught me to trust my artistic voice. I began the project with some skewed expectations- I thought that I was going to create a body of work that was impressive enough to convince people that I was really an artist. I think everyone except me already knew that. What I’m left with now is a body of work that reiterates a truth that was true all along.
I picked out some illustrations from my 100 Day Project and made prints of them that are available to purchase here. If you want to participate in a 100 day project of your own then you should definitely do that. I think there’s a specific time of year when the official 100 Day Project happens but you should just start now or tomorrow or whenever you want to. The possibilities are endless! You could bake a cake every day for 100 days, take a photo of yourself every day for 100 days, write a short story every day for 100 days… it’s all up to you.
I’m starting this blog mostly to just get thoughts out of my head and organized in one place but also to confront my fear of being perceived (something for another blog post). I’m happy to write into the void but I also really do appreciate anyone who decides to read this and I’m open to hearing all the thoughts you have about any of the subjects I write about! What would you do for your 100 Day Project? What do you think of my 100 Day Project? Don’t hold back, I spent 5 years in art school so I know how to take critical feedback well.
Love you