40/100.

I am forty days into my 100 Day Project. I started early this year because I wanted to be done before spring when I’ll be outside getting the gardens ready. 

I’ve come to a few realizations about my project and the main one is something that I should have learned after last year’s project.

Last year, I started out with a simple plan to make one four-inch square collage each day, but I soon got tired of those limitations and just did whatever size I felt like doing. This often meant that I was working for hours to produce a collage just to have something decent to post that day. That is a lot of pressure to put on yourself. By the time the 100 days were up, I was tired.

I intended to work differently for my 2022 project by doing a collage a day in a sketchbook, which would give me a larger size to work on. I thought that I could create a quick, casual collage to scan and post, leaving lots of time in my day for working on larger, more complex projects.  Instead, I left the sketchbook behind and started, well, working for hours to produce a collage that was way more complicated than it needed to be.

I can’t maintain that sort of energy for another sixty days. More artists are starting to post their plans for projects on Instagram, and I look at how simple they are with envy.  Why can’t I just commit to a small project that I could neatly keep in a sketchbook or box? 

It’s like I start a competition with myself to make every day bigger and better. It doesn’t help that one of those collages earned me a thousand new followers!  

It’s time to reconsider what I’m doing with this project. One idea was to return to a small format, but I’ve twice proven that doesn’t work for me. I could limit myself only to Gelli prints, but as I’m surrounded by all my vintage papers, I know that it wouldn’t be long before I started sneaking in book pages. I could promise only to use a glue stick, which would mean that I’d stay away from the papers that don’t adhere nicely with anything except matte medium.

If you are still with me, I’ve come to a solution that I think will work. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but that’s the magic of writing out your thoughts. I’ll set a time limit of thirty minutes and stick to it!  Size, papers, and adhesives can be anything I’d like, but when thirty minutes are up, I’m done. 

Share your 100 Day Project plans or experiences with me! I’d love to hear from you and learn from you.