Category Archives: Drawing

The 100-Day Project Ten Years Later and What’s Next?

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Ten years ago, on April 6th, 2015, after reading Elle Luna’s Great Discontent article titled “Elle Luna: 100-Day Project – What Could You Do with 100 Days of Making?” a while before, I decided to start my 100-Day Project.

The 100-Day Project is about doing something creative for 100 days. It could be writing a novel or short story, making comic strips, taking photos, drawing landscapes, painting portraits, creating cooking videos, writing or performing music, etc., every day for 100 days.

A guy I know by the name of Jeremy Keith wrote 100 100-word blog posts over the 100-days.

I’m Going to Paint

My first thought of doing some creative work for 100 days was painting, which I hadn’t done in about ten years.

What to paint didn’t matter before I started, but it would come to me along the way of what to paint.

In the meantime, I checked my paints and brushes, which were in good condition, and then went out to a large chain art supply store in Washington, DC, to purchase a bunch of canvases.

After looking around the store, I went with the hard-backed canvas boards. That way, I could store them more efficiently when the paintings were completed, and they wouldn’t take up as much space.

What to Paint?

Since I spent at least one day a week with friends as part of a larger wine group that had a tasting to improve my knowledge of wine, I decided to paint wine bottle shapes. The wine bottles consisted of the bottle, label, and foil cap. Nothing fancy with much, if any, shading, label information, etc.

Being a novice painter and having only taken a few painting and art classes at our local Torpedo Factory, I wasn’t going to do more than the shapes of bottles with painted backgrounds.

I started slow and got used to using my oil paints again on the first paintings.

Then, after I was used to painting all over again, I pulled out my palette knives to use them as well. At first, I painted the wine bottle shape with my paintbrush and then used the palette knife to do the background.

I enjoyed the palette knife paintings more because of the different textures I could create.

How Did It Go?

After starting it, I slept better and had more dreams, which I tend not to have had many, if any, before.

As the days went by, I enjoyed myself and began to improve.

I then had to purchase more canvases since I was running low because I did not buy all 100 in case after the first 20 or 30 days or sooner stopped.

How Many Painting Did I Do?

Around day 178 or so, which was the end of September, I was driving to An Event Apart in Austin, TX., and made it into a road trip to use up my vacation. By doing that, I could not easily paint every day with wet canvases and be in a different AirBnB or hotel room.

So I started using my iPad Mini 2 to start drawing digital wine bottles with the iOS application pencil, which was, at the start, much harder to do than painting.

After that, I kept making the wine bottles digitally even when I returned home.

How Did Digital Drawing Go?

I am still enjoying drawing wine bottles digitally using the Pencil app.

At some point, Pencil was sold, and then the new owners wanted to charge a one-time fee for features I had been using for about four years. So, I did not upgrade to the next version for nine or ten months so I could keep the one I was using.

Somewhere along the way, I hit the update ALL applications button on my iPad, which updated the Pencil app. In doing so, because it was so long ago, the new app lost all my previous wine bottle drawings, some of my coolest ones.

The number of digital wine bottles I had drawn at the point was approximately 1,761. They are likely somewhere on my iPad but lost in the application.

I sighed, shrugged my shoulders, and moved on; I could do nothing.

I started over, and currently, I have 1,698 digital wine bottles on my iPad.

So How Many Wine Bottle Paintings and Drawing Did I Make?

I did 178 paintings (need to check), 1,761 digital drawings before I lost them, and 1,698 in the current batch for a total of 3,637 wine bottles out of the last 3,652 days ( two leap years).

The number could be higher because I did not remember what number I was on when I lost the first batch of digital drawings or miss numbering them.

Either way, I’m happy to have only missed 15 days over the past 10 years.

What’s Next?

I will start a new 100-Day Project today to shoot, edit, and publish cooking videos, including music, sound effects, graphics, etc.

This project will be a bit different, more or less than a typical 100-day project, because I’m looking to spend at least 30 minutes each day (likely after work) learning how to use DaVinci Resolve (video editing software) which is FREE from the two or three courses I paid for over a year ago.

I have not been giving the editing videos the effort I need to learn how to edit quickly and efficiently.

On the weekend, I plan to spend an hour a day either learning more about DaVinci Resolve or watching YouTube videos related to food to see how things are presented, talked about, etc. Another item is testing recipes from others or taking what I think are the best parts of a bunch of recipes to see if that works.

I want to be able to create 20 or 30 videos that are four to six minutes long that tell people how to cook certain foods before I post them so I can post half of them at once and then post one a week thereafter while making the next batch.

Another thing will be to read J. Kenji López-Alt two books, “Food Lab” and “The Wok,” as references and as a resource in videos, along with Michael Pollan’s handful of food books and Harold Mcgee’s books for the same reason.

Then, I will watch food/cooking-related series such as Mind of a Chef (YouTube), Michael Pollan, and other Amazon or Netflix shows like Salt Fat Acid Heat, Somebody Feed Phil (seven seasons), Vivian Howard PBS shows (A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South).

NOTE – This next 100-Day Project might not be in the whole spirit of the original, but it will get me there in the end if I make it a habit to practice every day.

I plan to take notes of my findings in notebooks or digitally and track how much time I spend during the learning process. The goal will be to spend 20 – 30 hours a month.

Yes, I will continue to draw more digital wine bottles. It’s a thing I do before bed each night. Some might call it a habit.

2021 Reading List

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My 2021 book reading started well and continued with a slow plod through the longer books.

Total Books Read

I started strong and finished the year strong too by reading 26 books, which was three more than last year.

My plan was to read when I could and see how much I could get through.

Book Length in Pages

Like last year (2020), the books I read were both long and short and were between 120 and 150 pages, while others were over 450+ pages.

Need More YouTube Learning

To break up my reading, I continued watching YouTube to learn about different ways to cook, start a small farm, create videos/movies, ideas for a tiny house, etc. More on that likely in another post.

List of Books

Below is the list of books I read. They are more or less in the order I read them.

  • Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book – Lynda Barry
  • Austin Kleon
    • Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative
    • Show Your Work! 10 Ways To Show Your Creativity And Get Discovered
    • Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad
  • One Percent Better – Yearbook Five by Hiut Denim
  • Do Sea Salt – The Magic of Seasoning. by Alison, David, and Jess Lea-Wilson
  • Amoralman – A True Story and Other Lies by Derek DelGaudio
  • Charles Dowding’s No Dig Gardening, Course 1: From Weeds to Vegetables Easily and Quickly by Charles Dowding
  • The First-Time Gardener: Growing Vegetables: All the know-how and encouragement you need to grow – and fall in love with! – your brand new food garden (Volume 1) by Jessica Sowards
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates
  • Restoration Agriculture Real-world Permaculture for Farmers by Mark Shepard
  • Do Walk: Navigate earth, mind and body. Step by step. by Libby DeLana
  • Do Make: The Power of Your Own Two Hands by James Otter
  • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
  • Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition by Norman Maclean
  • The Backyard Adventurer: Meaningful and Pointless Expeditions, Self-experiments, and the Value of Other People’s Junk by Beau Miles
  • The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-to-Basics Guide by John Seymour
  • Fermentation as Metaphor by Sandor Ellix Katz
  • Do Preserve: Make your own jams, chutneys, pickles, and cordials. (Easy Beginners Guide to Seasonal Preserving, Fruit and Vegetable Canning and Preserving Recipes) by Anja Dunk, Jen Goss, and Mimi Beaven
  • Do Open: How a Simple Email Newsletter Can Transform your Business by David Hieatt
  • Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan
  • How to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh
  • Make a World by Ed Emberley
  • The “You Don’t Know JavaScript Yet” series books by Kyle Simpson
    • Types & Grammar – 1st Edition
    • Async & Performance – 1st Edition
    • ES6 & Beyond – 1st Edition

List of Magazines

  • Growers & Co
    • Celebrating the Movement of Small-scale Organic Agriculture – Issue 01
    • A Promise of Renewal – Shaping Stronger Food Systems and Social Change in the Movement of Small-scale Organic Agriculture – Issue 02
    • A Regenerative Movement – Explore How Growers are Redefining the Agricultural System in Favor of Traditional Practices that Preserve te Health of Ecosystems and Their Communities – Issue 03

I plan to do a more in-depth write-up of the ones I liked the best in the future.

More Reading in 2022

Here to as much or more reading in 2022 as in 2021 if possible.

Please leave a comment if you read any of these books and your thoughts.

 

Drawing Faces

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After a friend’s child saw me doing a digital drawing on my iPad we started drawing faces. Since they showed interest in drawing, I purchased them a copy of Ed Emberley’s “Drawing Book of Faces”. So we could both draw all the faces in the book over time.

I had purchased “Drawing Book of Faces” book and a few others of Mr. Emberley’s after Austin Kleon mentioned using them. He suggested they were great to get children or adults drawing. I thought it would be a great way to do something creative. Along with learning how to draw faces better, even if most of them were more cartoonish.

Sent Book to Friends Child

I sent the book to my friend’s child. We started by drawing only one face a day, which worked well since there are six to a row on each page. That way, if we missed a day, we could still get them done in a week.

We checked in the first week and shared a few of our drawings.

Drawing on Phone with My Finger

I found drawing faces on my phone with my finger was challenging to do. They were having issues too. So I suggested we move to paper instead. They agreed that would be better.

I kept at it on my phone and still have even after finishing the 295+ faces in the book. In some of my pages, I put more than one related face. So there are probably, closer to 325 or more paces in the book.

At some point, my friend’s child got tired of drawing and stopped. Recently, I heard they got an iPad and have been using another digital drawing application to draw instead of their phone. Here’s hoping using the iPad will keep them drawing and improving in the process.

Moved on to Next Drawing Book

Once done with the faces book, I moved on to Mr. Emberley’s “Drawing book Make a World.” This book has planes, trains, cars, buildings, ships, animals, etc., to draw.

More Creativity in My Day

I find it’s a subtle way to do some creative drawing in about 10 or 15 minutes. It can be done while watching or listening to something on my computer in the evening to unwind. You don’t need a lot of skill as I have proven to be able to do these drawings,

So here’s to more drawing/creativity in my day and yours.

100 Day Project

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Back on April 6th, 2015, I started the 100 Day Project to do 100 days of something creative. Some people wrote for 100 days, while others drew or made mini-movies, sang, coded, etc.

Preparing to Paint

I decided it had been probably eight or ten years since I painted, so I thought I would do that. I checked on my paints, and even though they were old, they were in great shape to use.

A week or two before, I went to get a few new brushes and some small canvas boards to paint on. I ended up getting the following size boards: 4 x 6, 5 x 7, 8 x 10, and even a few 10 x 12. All those are in inches not feet.

Started Painting

On the evening of the 6th of April, I started using my new boards and brushes to paint wine bottle shapes on a colored background. It was rough going at first, but I kept at it.

As my skills improved, I used my pallet knives to paint either the bottle or the background. Doing so allowed me to learn again how to use them. At some point, I even did both bottles and background with the pallet knife.

Switched to Digital Drawing

I kept this up for about 180 days or so before going to New York City for a long weekend. So I wasn’t going to bring my paints, etc. to paint while in New York. I was concerned about how to bring wet paintings home in the train. So I carried my iPad and learned how to do a digital drawing using Paper by 53.

At first, I did my drawing with my fingers. The drawings weren’t that good and probably wouldn’t have been much better using a digital pencil either.

Then when Paper by 53 came out with their pencil, I bought one. Purchasing the pencil gave me more features/tools in the application and improved my wine bottle shape drawings.

At some point, I missed a day or so along the way.

I’m currently at drawing/painting 2,107 out of I think it’s like 2,117 or so days.

So not bad being creative each day minus ten or so days over almost five years. Some of it could be a bit of miss numbering, but I think it’s more. I missed a few days.

So I have missed on average two days a year. Not bad in my book.

Application Upgrade

At one point, the application wanted people to pay a monthly fee after upgrading to the newest version. So I held off for many, many months.

At some point during the summer of 2020, I mistakenly upgraded after such a long time. Because it had been so long since the improvements, I lost 1,700 – 1,800 digital drawings.

I think they are still on my iPad somewhere, but I haven’t been able to find them, and I never downloaded them. Which I had thought to do many a time but didn’t.

It was a momentary feeling of loss, but I figured what was I going to do at that point. Okay, there might have been a few swear words mumbled under my breath. Only because it was late at night, and I didn’t want to wake up the upstairs neighbors.

Other Daily Creative Projects

I have done a similar thing with GitHub for a project to keep track of places to eat when I travel (Gotta Eat Here).

Then I started another drawing thing with a friend’s child. After they saw me doing my drawing each day, I was visiting them and showed interest in doing the same thing.

I will write more on those in future posts.

Here’s to More Creativity

So here is to doing something creative each day to break up work, life, and the pandemic. While not making it into something that makes you feel bad/stressed if you miss a day.

It’s supposed to be fun and not stressful.

More Blogging this Year

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Over the last few weeks, I have been thinking I need to blog more to get things out of my head. While keeping track of things that happened in 2020. Along with things that will happen this year.

I used to write long blog posts that were way too long and needed code examples. But not too many posts at all in recent years. So it would take a day or even a week or a month to get it all done or sit in my drafts forever. Some are still there now.

To make it easier, I’m looking to write shorter pieces. About life, food, health, weight loss, walking, accessibility, learning, etc. And at the same time, attempting to keep them between five hundred and a thousand words.

I might even post a quick photo from my walking the neighborhood. Or what I’m eating or reading, etc., with a few words about what it is or why I’m posting it.

There might even be some posts with some of my drawings, but most likely not.

Or I could finish and post old drafts that I have lying around that need to get out into the world.

So look for more writing from me this year. I am looking to keep it going more often than once or twice a year.

So this post came in at 238 words, so it’s a good start to writing shorter posts.