Encountering delusions of grandeur
Maybe I’ll return to this drawing after #the100dayproject is over, or re-start it with a fresh leaf. Today’s accomplishment was getting a rough sketch of a large leaf—and that’s good enough for today, even if it’s not worth claiming bragging rights on in an Instagram post.
Last week, I bought a beautiful bunch of red chard while grocery shopping. It was in the organic section, which tends to have more attractive leafy greens than the regular section. I don’t think there are any artists who find leafy greens UNinspiring! The big, colorful veins, deep, bright greens, wavy, bubbly leaf textures are dynamic and challenging to render. This leaf was definitely on my mind as a possible subject for drawing during the project. And after all, it would fit easily onto a 9” x 12” piece of paper, a modest size for a drawing, even with a mental time constraint of devoting only an hour or so per day to the
Starting the project directly with some hard pastels was certainly fun. And immediately laying in the bold colors of the leaf was enjoyable, rather than slowly building up delicate layers of wash. After an hour and a half, though, it was obvious that a sheet of drawing paper barely larger than a piece of typing paper (or A4) and a leaf with a surface area that was not even the size of my 2 palms were going to become a Major Project.
And a Major Project every day for 100 days is not what #the100dayproject is all about. The 100-Day Project is A Major Project all by itself. A Major Project that consist of many Mini Projects. Or maybe a Major Project that consists of 100 days of work on a different Major Project.
#the100dayproject Tip: Avoid Delusions of Grandeur. It’s all too easy to get excited about a complex image, of choose a big piece of paper, or in some other way expand the scope of the daily session beyond what you can reasonably accomplish in one block of time. Unless you have designed a large-scale project that can be completed one task per day for 100 days (such as a ceramics project, where you throw x number of mugs for x number of days, then do the trimming, firing and glazing, resulting in a large batch of finished mugs on day 100), your energy and enthusiasm will be better sustained by making a small, discrete object each day, so you enjoy that dopamine hit that arrives with a sense of completion.
