Halfway Through the 100 Day Project
I’m officially halfway through the 100 Day Project, which feels a little bonkers because there are now fifty tiny panels spread around the studio and approximately eight thousand scraps of paper that I apparently cannot bring myself to throw away.
When I started, I knew I wanted to keep the scale small. Everything is built on 4x4 panels, partly because that made doing one every day feel possible and partly because I did not need one hundred larger pieces taking over the studio. I have enough problems with storage already, thankyouverymuch. Haha.
The small size has definitely changed how I work, though. There isn’t much room to fuss with things forever, and a shape that might feel minor in a larger piece suddenly takes up half the damn composition. Edges matter more, little bits of color matter more, and I’ve had to get much better about deciding when something is actually helping and when I’m adding another layer because I don’t know what else to do.
A lot of the project has ended up using fragments of older work too, which I really didn’t plan at the beginning. I have drawers full of collage scraps, failed prints, torn pieces of older paintings, and miscellaneous bits that survived every previous studio purge because apparently I thought they might become useful someday. Turns out Past Cookie was occasionally correct.
It’s been fun seeing what happens when those fragments get pulled away from whatever they originally belonged to. Something that felt completely unimportant in an older piece can suddenly become the best part of one of these tiny panels. A weird edge, a little patch of texture, or some color combination I barely noticed the first time gets a whole different life once I move it somewhere else.
That’s also made me think a little differently about the pile of abandoned and unfinished work I tend to accumulate. I’m pretty quick to decide something “didn’t work,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything useful left in it. Maybe the whole piece was a dud, but one little section might still be doing something interesting. Apparently I just needed to cut it up and stop expecting it to be the thing I originally wanted it to be.
Making this many pieces has also made some of my habits VERY obvious. I keep reaching for certain shapes, colors, textures, and ways of breaking up the surface. A few of those things I already knew were part of my work, but others have been more like, “Huh. Apparently I do that constantly.” Fifty pieces sitting together will rat you out pretty quickly.
It’s also easier to see where I get comfortable. There are decisions I make because they actually work for the piece and others I make because I know how to do them and they’re sitting there waiting for me. Doing something every day makes that distinction a little harder to ignore, which is annoying but probably useful. Haha.
The part I’ve enjoyed most is being a lot less precious about the work. At this size, I’m much more willing to rip something off, cover half the piece, glue something down crooked, or completely change direction if it isn’t working. I don’t have three weeks invested in any one panel, so there’s less of that terrible feeling of “but I already spent SO MUCH TIME on this” keeping me from messing with it. Of course, now that I’m halfway through, I’m already thinking about what happens when I’m done. Because apparently I cannot simply complete the project currently in front of me without mentally wandering off into the next one.
The biggest thing I keep coming back to is scale. I’m enjoying these tiny pieces, but I’m also getting VERY curious about what some of these ideas would do if I gave them more room. There are panels I look at and immediately start imagining as larger collages or paintings, although I don’t really want to recreate them exactly. I’m more interested in taking whatever is happening in them and seeing what it turns into once it isn’t trapped inside four inches.
I miss working big too. I love being able to move around a surface, make bigger marks, step back, come in again, and let the composition develop across more physical space. These little panels are great for making me focus, but they’re also reminding me how much I like work that involves more than my fingertips and wrist. So at Day 50, I’m not really sure where all of this ends up yet, which is probably okay since I still have fifty more damn pieces to make before I need an answer.
For now I have a studio full of tiny layered squares, a growing collection of scraps that have apparently earned another stay of execution, and a much better sense of what I keep reaching for when I make without spending forever thinking about it first. I’m curious to see what gets even more obvious by the time all one hundred are sitting together.