We are more than 1/4 of the way through the 100 Day Project (mine is #100DaysofWatercolorWithoutReference) and I thought I would share an update about how I'm doing and where I'm at.
So far I'm enjoying myself and liking most of the art that I'm making. I'm pretty familiar with the ebb and flow of this kind of long term project and I understand that sometimes I'm happy to spend several hours in the day working on a piece and some days I'm painting something quickly right before midnight because I'm unmotivated and some days I just don't have time to get anything but the bare minimum done. As I've whined about all over Instagram, this past week was an incredibly busy/stressful work week for me and I was worried about having the time/energy to devote to painting, but I managed to keep up with it and actually painted something I loved on my busiest day, Friday. I'm going through a bunch of life changes these days that will probably keep me very busy, but I think that if I could stick with painting during the past week then I shouldn't have a problem keeping the momentum going for the rest of the 100 days.
Quite a bit of the work that I've produced so far has been abstract, which is unusual for me. I think that anyone who makes art will tell you that creating abstract art is so much more difficult than it looks. I can write a whole post about this if anyone is interested, but it takes a lot of work and skill to get the balance and composition right on an abstract piece, and it was something that I had always kind of shied away from and thought wasn't for me. I have only been working with abstracts for a few months, and I definitely have much more to learn, but I keep feeling pulled to make them whenever I sit down to paint, so I'm doing it. If I wanted to over-analyze it, I could say that maybe I'm so interested in abstracts because I'm going through all of those aforementioned changes and I don't really have an idea about what my life and future will look like. Or maybe this is just the creative impulse that I'm feeling right now.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been super busy lately and have been mostly painting late at night, which typically means crappy, badly-lit photos, sometimes before the paintings are even dry. It is kind of a bummer to post such bad photos on Instagram. Maybe it sounds shallow or something, but I want my Instagram feed to reflect the inside of my brain and I want to be proud of everything I share on it. I don't lose sleep over this or anything, but I think that maybe next time I will need to think of a way to participate in these challenges without the daily IG photo (maybe a different account or a Tumblr page or (gasp) just not forcing myself to post photos every single day). Or maybe next time I will have had enough of a break and will be happy to post daily photos.
So yeah, that's where I'm at with my 100 Day Project. Doing pretty well, probably overthinking it, per usual. I think my plan for the remaining days is to just keep going with the flow and making what I feel like making. I definitely have an impulse to try to push myself harder and more out of my comfort zone with this project, but I don't think that is what I really need to be doing right now. We will just see where this goes.