Halfway Through the 100 Day Project

I’m officially halfway through the 100 day project, which feels a little strange to say out loud. There are now fifty small panels spread across the studio, stacks of paper scraps everywhere, and little bits of older work slowly finding their way into new pieces. When I started this project, I knew I wanted the scale to stay small. Everything is built on 4x4 panels, and that size has changed the way I approach composition completely.

Working this small forces me to pay attention differently. There isn’t much room to overwork things or endlessly adjust the composition. Every shape, edge, and layer matters because the space fills up quickly. I’ve actually really enjoyed that limitation. It keeps me focused on relationships between materials and surfaces instead of trying to make every piece into something overly resolved or overly important.

A big part of this project has involved reworking older pieces and fragments that have been sitting around the studio for years. Some are leftover collage scraps, some are failed prints, some are pieces that never quite found their footing the first time around. I’ve always had a hard time throwing things away completely, especially if there’s still some interesting texture or color relationship hiding in there somewhere. This project finally gave me a structure for revisiting those materials instead of letting them pile up in drawers indefinitely.

What’s been interesting is how different those fragments feel once they’re removed from the original piece. A section of texture or a torn edge that barely registered before suddenly becomes the strongest part once it’s isolated and layered into something new. It’s made me realize how much unfinished or abandoned work still contains useful information, even if the original piece itself wasn’t working.

The project has also reminded me how much I like building surfaces through accumulation. Every panel becomes a small negotiation between texture, interruption, layering, and shape. Some pieces come together quickly and others take forever because I keep rearranging scraps and second-guessing edges. But even the slower pieces have helped me understand more about how I naturally organize space and where my attention tends to go compositionally.

Now that I’m at the halfway point, I keep thinking about scale and what happens after this project ends. The small format has been really useful because it lowered the pressure enough for me to experiment freely, but I’m already getting curious about what these same ideas would feel like larger. I want to see what happens when the layering has more room to spread out and when those divisions of space can move across a bigger surface instead of staying compressed into a tiny square.

I’ve caught myself looking at certain panels and thinking about how they could expand into larger collage works or paintings. Not exact recreations, but continuations. The 4x4 pieces feel almost like studies or fragments of a larger visual language that’s starting to emerge as the project continues.

That’s probably one of the most valuable things about working on something consistently for this long. Patterns start revealing themselves whether you intend them to or not. I’m noticing recurring shapes, repeated color relationships, certain textures I keep gravitating toward, and ways of dividing the surface that I apparently return to over and over again. Some of those tendencies were probably already present in my work, but the repetition of the project makes them easier to see.

Working daily has also helped me loosen up a bit. Because the pieces are small, I’m less precious about them. I’ll tear things apart faster, cover sections up without panicking, or completely change direction halfway through. That looseness has been good for me because it keeps the process active instead of overly controlled. I think the project has also shifted the way I think about old work in general. Instead of seeing abandoned pieces as failures or dead ends, I’m starting to see them more as material waiting for another form. Some of these fragments just needed a different context or scale before they made sense.

So right now the studio is full of these tiny layered pieces, and at the same time I’m already thinking ahead to what happens when the project finishes and the work starts expanding outward. The small scale has taught me a lot, but it’s also made me want to test these same ideas in a larger format and see how the energy changes once the surfaces have more space to sit and be still.