Earlier this year, I participated in (and finished!) the 100 Days Project. My project was something super low stakes and something super easy–draw something every day and post it on social media. I didn’t want to pick a theme because I thought it would kneecap my ability to finish the project. I was flipping through other people’s projects and saw someone complaining about drawing fish for more than a month and being sick of it. As it was my first foray into the 100 days project, I didn’t want to get sick of drawing or making or doing any one thing for 100 days and not getting to the finish line. So I kept it super easy–just draw something, every day. And I made it. It actually fit nicely into my ongoing project of maintain a daily creative habit. I’ve been drawing or making something every single day since the end of 2023. With this initial project behind me, I’m itching to do another 100 days project. Something with a concrete theme. Something that will look good as a set at the end. Even if I get tired of drawing 100 days of fish.
Some ideas:
- Cats. I am not good at drawing cats, but I want to draw cats and I love looking at other people’s illustrations of cats. I wasn’t always a cat person, but having become a cat person, I can’t get over them. I don’t think I’ll get tired of drawing cats for 100 days.
- Mandalas. I sort of started this already. Mandalas feel very adjacent to doodling for me and drawing them is very meditative and something I can find myself doing every day, but I don’t want to get too caught up in making a “pretty” mandala.
- Doodling or tangling. Along the lines of mandalas, I think doodling or tangling is something I can keep up every day. Life long doodler. I’ve always doodle in the margins of my notebooks, meeting notes. I like having something to do with my hands as I listen to something, and it is also helpful when the content of the lecture or meeting is especially boring, because then I just start to tune out and focus on my doodling.
- Watercolors. This one is tough and also something I sort of started doing. I want to improve my watercolors but, having started it, it has already started to feel exhausting to haul out my watercolors every day and try, when the results are not so great or mediocre or look like student work. I’m about nearly 20 non-consecutive days into this, and half of that has been stroke practice. I’ve made a list of various watercolor classes and challenges to follow so I’m not just stuck staring at a blank page or stressing about what to make in watercolor.
In any event, I don’t think any of these more thematic practices can be 100 consecutive days. I just don’t want to make the same thing every day and it takes the pressure off if I miss a day or break the streak. The “draw every day” is still ongoing. That is going to be going on in the background regardless.
Oh, just thought of another one:
- Journaling. This is more writing, so maybe it doesn’t overlap with drawing or art so I’m not burning out of making art every day. I’ve never really been able to keep up a journal for extended periods of time. I adore those pretty bullet journal spreads or even those minimal and fiercely functional spreads, but I can never, ever maintain the habit. I get bored of writing or chronicling my life, even though my earliest aspirations were to publish my own memoirs. When I was ten, I thought I would chronicle and document my entire life, which, at ten years of age, was not a lot of time and felt totally manageable. Having a few more or a lot more years under my belt, the thought of keeping and documenting everything is just…exhausting. But there is something nice about being able to rewind to years earlier, look at what I was doing or writing or stressing about, because even last year feels so far away.