100-day project - episod 2

 The first 10 days of the project

Since my last blogpost, I have started this art challenge... And actually, as a fellow artist reminded me, it is not a challenge, but a project!

Here is a video I have done one the first 09 days, while painting for the 10th day.

The first few days - tree series

To start the project, I decided to start "slow", and start by my tree series. A few months ago (or maybe a year?), I had dedicated a whole sketchbook to studying different types of trees. However, after 10 trees I just dropped the whole thing... I could not find what style I wanted to do, I was frustrated because there was no coherence between the pages, etc.  During the first 6 days of the 100-day project, I picked this back right where I left. I had made a list of the trees I wanted to put on the sketchbook, so it was just a matter of drawing / painting them. It took me about 20minutes each day, and I was going strong! I had more or less the same layout on each page (I love putting some swatches of the colors I use next to the drawings), I was experimenting with different medium, while keeping the watercolors&ink base that I intended for the sketchbook... Everything was going fine! 

Some pics of the trees on the first days!

First hurdles - confusing projects and challenges

The weekend arrived, and so did the problems! First, I decided to leave my tree series for a day, as I had planned on filming a Youtube video. I wanted to have a "normal" video (not a vlog or series video), so I chose one of the other things I wanted to paint during the 100-day project (rocks), and decided to film while I was tackling this subject. I ended up not being super happy with the resulting video (at the time I am writing this blogpost, I am still wondering if I should edit it or not...). 

Day 7 - Sarah Burns Skillshare class on painting rocks

The next day, a friend visited us, and I spent the day visiting Vienna with him. The following days, I had an unexpected and quite heavy work load to deal with... and a few days passed without any artistic endeavors. I started to feel guilty about myself "not even a week into the challenge, and you are already falling behind and failing it!". That's when a fellow artist reminded me that it is a 100-day project, not a challenge! I can do it every day, or every two days. Or not doing anything for a month. It does not matter. It is just an incentive to tackle some long-term artistic projects!

A fresh start?

Feeling less guilty, I focused on my work load, and once things started to ease back (after 3 days), I went back to my tree series. There, I realized that some of the trees on my list were not so different from each other, and that I was not so motivated to paint them... But for now, I am doing all of the inspiring ones, and I will think about the other ones later!

I have also started to plan more my videos, to align them with the 100-day project and try to avoid frustrating filming sessions like the last one. I will try to do a "vlog like" video every 10 days or so, the first one will be kind of a recap of episod 1 & 2 of this blog. I will also do some other videos linked to my series of painting. 

Let's see if these readjustments will make it easier for the following days! Almost 10 down (I am doing Day 10 tomorrow, see the video on top).