5 Lessons Learned From #The100DayProject So Far

It’s about two months into my 100 Day Project, which is part of Elle Luna‘s official #The100DayProject. This is the second year of the challenge, which was originally inspired by Elle Luna’s book The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion, which was based on her equally amazing essay. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself and favor and do so now.

100 day challenges are fairly common, especially on Instagram. One of the first I participated in was #100HappyDays. The challenge was based on the age-old advice that in order to quell anxiety and become a happier person,  one has to start recognizing happiness in the everyday. The challenge required people to share this discovered happiness and post it on Instagram, each day for 100 days. And wouldn’t you know it, people would fill their Instagram feed with positive and inspiring moments. The on-demand nature of personal social sharing kept people accountable for sticking to the challenge. Hopefully when the challenge was over, they made finding everyday happiness a daily habit. It sure made a difference for me.

I participated in the #100DayProject last year but didn’t complete it. (I tried to challenge myself based on time, not completed works). This year I’ve managed to keep working on the project, but have slightly fallen behind. However, so far the whole endeavor has provided me a few lessons about building habits and the creative process:

1. Committing to doing one thing every day for 100 days is hard.
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   I have a habit of pretending to be a far more disciplined person than I actually am. I also go to extremes, such as when I thought I could wake up at 5 am every day to do creative work before going to the gym and starting a full work day. The only time I have ever been successful at that was when I did grand jury duty for two weeks and all I really did all day afterward was try to read Infinite Jest inside the court room.
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   When I started this current project, I think it was the first day that I set my alarm for 5 am. The alarm went off, a disgruntled and sleepy Eric handed me my phone, I hit the snooze, and that was that.
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   Since then, I’ve realized that every day is different and some daily habits (especially those accomplished before the workday) are better when it has a fixed time slot. For instance, going to the gym at 6 am for an hour and a half was doable (mostly because I barely thought about it). For me, sitting and waiting for inspiration to happen, especially first thing in the morning, was impossible. I’ve since learned I’m a much more creative at night. I also changed my strategy by making it possible to draw wherever I was. I kept a book and a pen and whether it was a long train ride or a break at work, I would do drawings to meet my quota.
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2. Committing to work on one project every day for 100 days is hard (and can get boring).
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   Full disclosure, I didn’t know about this year’s project until the day it started on April 19th. I came up with my project in under an hour and decided to do #100DaysofGesture to challenge myself. While it was fun to sketch Prince on the day of his passing (RIP), it realized that the project itself was too broad for me to keep coming up with ideas and being challenged. It’s probably against the rules, but I decided to change my project halfway to #100DaysofNarrativeIcons. So far, I love it. It reminds me of emojis, but I love using it as a way to tell a story.
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3. The habit of creating something on a regular basis sparks new ideas.
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   I initially got so bored with doing gesture drawing every day that I actually came up with a few new ideas of different projects to do next time. When my brain would scrounge around for ideas, a few connections were made that not only could show off my drawing abilities, but add some sense of humor and tell a story.
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4. Half the battle of sticking to something is forgiving yourself if you fall behind.
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   I fell behind by a few days. I was this close to forgetting the whole thing. Instead, I sat down one night this week and planned how I could catch up. It’s probably cheating again, but I came up with a strategy on how to create fresh new drawings more than once a day. 
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5. You have to be accountable for the quality of your work.
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   I will admit, there are a few drawings where I phoned it in. I focused on just getting in my daily quota instead of being 100% happy with the results. However, as with most projects and work, not giving it your best effort doesn’t help anyone. It’s one thing to look at someone else’s work and say “I can do better”, but it’s an entirely different matter when you look at your own work and think the same thing. That thought has helped push me to think about the quality of work I can deliver and how else I can further push myself.
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So while it’s the official halfway point of the project, I am excited to continue through to the end. Feel free to follow along on my Instagram account @mynameisreb.  Let me know if you’ve ever struggled with creating a daily habit in the comments section below.

Creative Office Hours

A few months ago I decided to be serious about my creative side projects. For too long I was letting work and my professional career take my focus away from creative endeavors I had wanted to pursuit for years.

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However, with it came fear about starting something new, personal, and very intimate and the pressure of sharing it immediately with the world. If you’ve ever read The War of Art, you understand the conflict of wanting to create work but scared about it not being perfect.

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At the same time, there is a need to get feedback on where you should focus your creative path. One of the things I miss most from college is not just studying fine art, but having a place to share and talk about my work with other people.

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We all find ourselves more than capable of creating great work. More often than not, we need a sounding board to share our ideas or find inspiration from things that often remind us of ourselves. The life goal of a creator is self-expression, and while it might seem at first to be a solitary journey, you need to feel like part of something. That something is a part of a team, a collaborative environment where everyone is working to come up with ideas and produce good work.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the idea to try creating a community of people with creative side projects (and day jobs) that were willing to share their work with others, even if it was virtually.

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At first I was imagining a monthly meetup, salon style, for people to present their work to others and gain feedback. I wrote a post on Facebook to see who was initially interested and asked them directly if they had a creative project they were currently working on. I found two scenarios: either people were working on projects and had no community, or they had ideas for creative projects but didn’t know where to start.

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That’s how I came up with the idea of Creative Office Hours, a Facebook group (for now) where people can share and talk about their creative goals along with the struggles of working on a creative side hustle while balancing, well, life. The idea of “office hours” was based on something I do on a weekly basis: sitting at my desk at home and dedicated a few hours, on the same day of each week, to review my goals for the week and take care of other to do’s.

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It’s still very much in it’s infancy stage, but the group was created, it’s real, and you’re welcome to join if you currently have a creative side project to share, or need inspiration on how to start.

 

 

Starting #100DaysofGesture

 

Around this time last year, I read the excellent book The Crossroads of Should and Must: Find and Follow Your Passion by Elle Luna. Along with the release of her book, she launched the #100DayProject with The Great Discontent. I launched my own project focused on #100HoursOfPainting, but quickly realized the challenges of making a commitment based on time versus producing a tangible thing (you don’t do it!).

Attempting to paint for one hour a day seemed like an easy feat, especially on days when I would be able to put in 3 – 5 hours and get ahead of the daily schedule. It was great while I was doing grand jury duty and could paint between 5 – 8 am every morning, but then I started a new job and trying to fit in an hour within an already overly packed schedule was too much.

I also realized that the point of the project is not just to commit to sitting down every day to work on a project, but to produce a completed piece and feel a sense of accomplishment.

This year my project is #100DaysofGesture, focusing on a loose style of sketching usually used for warming up before figure drawing. I always liked the unfinished feeling of drawings done in gesture sketching style and how it has a dreamlike quality. It’s likely that most of the drawings will be portraits of people, whether from real life or photographs.

Throughout college and the past few years, I always liked going to drink-n-draws and figure drawing sessions, drawing from family photographs, and experimenting with capturing a person’s mood or expression in the sketch. I remember the summer I was interning in Chicago (and was incredibly broke) when I would spend my time riding the train and sketching strangers on the subway.  It was fantastic practice in being able to capture how someone looked as quickly (and conspicuously) as possible.

I also have done a series of paintings based on photos of myself and one of my sisters from childhood. The focus hasn’t always been to make sure the paintings “look just like us”, but more so to capture the childlike quality of our expressions in those photos. Recently I was visiting my parents and discovered a large box of photographs from my childhood, so I’ll have ample inspiration for this project.  I’ve also been wanting to focus on sketching and possibly caricature for an upcoming project I’m working on.

The challenge of this project for me is to share work right away, and only having one day at the most to tweak and perfect it. Having to post it on Instagram publicly will leave my project open to criticism, but it’s better than never showing anything at all.

You can follow my project on Instagram through #100DaysofGesture.

Kicking Off #100HoursofPainting

Check out my Instagram account @mynameisreb for more photos

It all started because my friend Jess became single again last fall.

I found out she broke up with her boyfriend while I was on a business trip to London, so within a few days of coming home, she and I planned on having dinner and talking about what happened. Instead, we found ourselves talking over our wine about what she was going to do moving forward. Since then, she’s been embarking on a journey of trying new things, taking classes, reading books, running, and embarking on a quest to discover her true passion in life. This coming from my most “professional” friend, who networks harder than anyone I know, is a member of multiple advertising clubs, and before finding her current job as a digital marketing manager had the most intense job seeking plan I’ve ever experienced, it wasn’t something I was used to.

Not Being “Allowed” to Volunteer

Follow me on Instagram @mynameisreb

When I look back on my life, I try to retrace my steps and think about what I had done that led me to where I am today. While in-between jobs last summer, I connected some dots and realized that volunteering and community service was a core component of who I am today. However, I’ve found that holding a full-time salary job and trying to volunteer on a regular basis extremely challenging, let alone the fact that all the “good” gigs get grabbed quickly, especially in NYC.

Psychedelic Print Patterns #30DaysofContent

I used to have a category on this blog that was essentially “my friends are better than your friends.” Not that my friends are any better than yours, but throughout the past few years they have turned out a few interesting projects. There was Sunvisor , my friend Erin Willett who was on The Voice earlier this year, and the film Birds of Paradise my friend Dave Formentin created. My friend James, or most formally known as “Cakes,” has been working on his personal portfolio the past few weeks and voila and here is the result: jedwardvincent.

How to Get Over this Monday

I had a great weekend and hope you did as well. A great weekend at this time of year is determined by the following factors: spending a majority of the day outside, lying in bed past 11 am, and getting some culture in. I usually end up not getting any work done during these great weekends, but every situation is a catch 22 if you make it to be. Now here we are, Monday morning, and there are five more days until another weekend is ready to be had. In the meantime, here are a few things helping me get over this Monday:

My Favorite Things #12: Marc Johns’ Serious Drawings

This morning my friend Namrata told me about Marc Johns and his  Serious Drawings. They are adorable, smart, and clever. His book Serious Drawings  has already made it onto my Christmas list.  These drawings have also inspired me to do one of those “one day for a year” projects starting January 1st which slightly more ambitious people do.

Life Last Week: Something I Ate (Third Week of November)

Last Friday I went to an event my friend Jose R. Mejia of Cool Hunting curated called Something I Ate at ACME Studio in Williamsburg. Something I Ate was a food/art event where  “creative minds converge[d]…with food being the principle medium.”

Starting The Sketchbook Project

I just finished repurposing the outside cover of my book as part of my contribution to The Sketchbook Project 2012 by Art House Co-op. It’s comprised of glue and NY Times clippings, along with a random scrap of paper I found on the floor of my apartment.