I found these groovy and perfectly new oil pastels in the bottom of one of my studio drawers. Inspiration strikes!
I plan to participate in this year’s edition of #the100dayproject, hosted by artist Lindsay Jean Thomson over on Instagram, @dothe100dayproject. Elle Luna began the Instagram art challenge in 2013, and Thomson became the facilitator in 2017. The event is based on the brainchild of designer Michael Bierut, who designed the 100-day project as an assignment for his graduate students at Yale back in the 1990s.
As a repeat failure at this challenge, I was leery of trying and failing yet again. My tendency is to either fall prey to delusions of grandeur that are impossible to fulfill, or to pick something so mundane that I lose interest a week or two in. In addition, I’m not much of a “joiner.”
The temptation to give it another go was strong. But could I find a way to make it align with my studio goals and focus for this year? Maybe doing a sketch a day—a page a day, or an hour a day would certainly help me reach my hours goal and also allow me to fill one or more sketchbooks. It would also allow me to complete the challenge with the supplies I already had on hand—a big plus. Still, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic.
Then earlier this week, I discovered a box of oil pastels I bought at a post-Christmas sale a decade or more ago, but had never used. Eureka! An opportunity to explore a new material that had always stumped me on how to exploit it in my work. I made some color charts in a couple of sketchbooks with different papers, and thought about parameters. The soft, squishy sticks with blunt tips will force my hand to try different ways to depict imagery than my typical highly rendered approach. It just really feels like a new and fresh approach, without being a high-pressure “portfolio goal.”
#the100dayproject starts this Sunday, February 23. My plan is to throw up a snapshot with a caption here for daily documentation, and doing a weekly summary over at my Substack (New Mexico Wildflowers). At this point, I’m not sure whether or how I intend to post at Instagram. As bad as Substack can be for a compulsive scroller like me, Instagram is far worse.
I sure hope you’ll join me on this adventure! How about you? Do you have a 100-day project in mind for this year? Or are you often turned off by the notion of doing something just because thousands of other people will be doing it at the same time too? Leave a note in the comments—I’d love to know your thoughts!
