100 Days Project Half Way Update

Part 3 of Confronting My Fear of the #100daysproject

Apr 16, 2022

As I sit down to write this post, it is actually day 59 of my 100 days project but I didn’t think about writing an update for the halfway benchmark until today.

First, a “thank you” to Cheryl Widen for sharing her story of finally giving herself permission to put herself first - after a full career serving others- to embrace her art, and to Beth Kattleman, who also embraced her creative passion (for collage) at a later age and passed on a recommendation for a book called Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Irvin Painter, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The History of White People. Nell entered art school at age 64!

And, as always, thanks to all of you for joining me again.

How is My 100 Days Project going?

After more than 50 days I am still going! I wouldn’t say strong, necessarily, but at least I am still going. In all this time I have only missed one day and that day was because I woke 2 hours later than usual and was feeling very crappy. I threw in the towel at mid-day.

One of the concerns I had at the beginning of this project was that I would run out of ideas and this did get to be a challenge. However, I found that joining Sketchbook Revival with Karen Abend helped take that load off for a couple of weeks!

In case you aren’t familiar with Sketchbook Revival, it is a two week, virtual smorgasbord of mini art lessons given by a variety of artists in a variety of mediums. Two sessions were offered each day. I generally got to trying out just one from each day. Some days, I didn’t choose any of the new sessions but went back and did another one I liked again. Much like an actual food buffet!

My favorite session was the one with Terry Runyon, who, despite being a big cat person, showed us how to paint birds! I loved this so much that this was one I did twice. Not only did I enjoy my results immensely, I was also comforted and encouraged by Terry’s commentary as she demonstrated the technique. I liked how she acknowledged the voice of her inner critic and how she modeled observing this then letting it go! It’s a skill that I definitely want to get better at.

This Sketchbook Revival activity was called “Blobs to Birds with Terry Runyon”

My next favorite session was called “Messy Recipes: The Overthinker’s Guide to Making Art.” In this session, Caylee Gray showed us how to use our fingers to paint in an art journal! I just happened to have an old book that served as the perfect support for this. I redecorated the cover first. Now I am adding mixed media art inside.

My mixed-media sketchbook. I ruined a mechanical pencil inscribing the title but it was worth it!

I’ve lost track of which days of my 100 Days Project these all correspond to.

Since I lost interest before the end of the event, even before Sketchbook Revival concluded, I was back to coming up with my own ideas: I painted butterflies from blobs, frogs from blobs, and one day I just painted blobs! I painted more flowers - always reliably accessible for me. Just recently I posted about the mending project I am working on. I let this project take three days by only doing a little each day. Good for both my hand health and eating up 3 days of my project!

The green square with orange stitching and blue-dotted rectangle with red stitching represent 3 days of my project.

Now I am on day 59. I decided to go back into my up-cycled mixed-media art book and return to drawing beach rocks, beach creatures, and seaweed.

A beach inspired piece in my up-cycled mixed-media sketchbook

What’s in store for the remainder of my 100 days project? Hmmm…I’ll probably know this tomorrow. Or not.

Have you been doing a 100 days project? I’d love to hear how it’s going for you? What are your strategies for keeping yourself going?

A Making Life

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