I am now 8 days through the 100 Days Project. This is a hashtag & trend I see going around social media every year--the goal is to do a small creative activity for 100 days. Ideally it would be an unbroken stretch, but life happens, so just keep going. Even though I have really disliked painting every day when I participate in July's World Watercolor Month, for some reason this had been calling to me.
The project is an official thing, with a website and community and everything, and it has an official start date at the end of January. But I just couldn't wait. I am not a patient person, and once I had settled on my project and gotten all my supplies, I decided it was silly to force myself to wait for an artificial deadline that I didn't even pick. So I jumped right in at the beginning of last week.
My project is 100 days of watercolor monochrome paintings. I purchased two new small sketchbooks to keep all my paintings together, and I'm using my Daniel Smith paint dot card (another birthday gift from June that's just been gathering dust & guilt for months). The goal is to use one dot per day, so the painting is in a single color (that's monochrome). This both provides a very clear limit to the decisions I have to make for my painting, ensuring I won't get overwhelmed by choices and avoid painting, and that the painting can be done quickly, in about 10-15 min per day. I can't use my beloved palette knives with these dried dots of paint, so I am also forced to work on my brush coordination, which is sorely lacking.
So these reasons are why I'm hoping this daily painting project will go better than past World Watercolor months. I'm also not going to be horrible to myself if I skip a day here or there. As long as I get at least 100 of these paintings done this year, I will consider this a success. Although, of course I am hoping for more--the dot card is the whole Daniel Smith watercolor paint line, so it came with over 200 paints. Ideally I'd finish my first 100 days and just keep going! So far it seems possible...although everything seems possible when you're less than 5% into a project.
I'd love to have you follow along on social media, or tell me in the comments if you're participating too and what your project is!
