I made a post with a list of art challenges that exist outside of Instagram for those of us who want to reduce the amount of time we spend in certain social media spaces, but keep ending up back there because we miss the community of it all (you know, the lie they sold us about social media in the first place?). Click for that post.

I thought I'd make an individual post for each of those challenges to expand upon them a bit.

First we have the 100 Day Project, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you choose something creative and do it for 100 days.

That “something” can be drawing, painting, collage, photography, embroidery, lettering, or really anything else you can repeat 100 times without becoming deeply annoyed by your own idea.

The nice thing about this project is that there aren’t many rules. You decide what you’re making, how long you’ll spend on it, and what counts as finishing for the day. One day might be a full illustration. Another might be a five-minute drawing of the coffee cup sitting next to you because it’s 10:47 p.m. and you suddenly remembered you were supposed to make something.

Still counts.

The goal isn’t to make 100 impressive pieces of art. Honestly, that sounds exhausting. The goal is to make creating feel like a regular part of your life instead of something you have to wait to feel inspired enough to do.

When you know you’ll be drawing again tomorrow, today’s drawing doesn’t have to be particularly important. It doesn’t have to prove anything about your talent, become a product, fit your portfolio, perform well online, or somehow justify the money you’ve spent on art supplies.

It can just be a drawing.

You can leave the project completely open-ended or choose a theme to make deciding what to draw a little easier. You could draw 100 birds, 100 weird houses, 100 objects from around your home, 100 imaginary plants, or 100 scenes from a place that doesn’t exist.

A theme can help because “draw anything you want” sounds freeing until you sit down and realize you have apparently never seen an object in your life.

You also don’t have to post every day. You don’t have to post at all. You can keep everything in one sketchbook, take a quick photo for yourself, or mark each finished day on a calendar. The community side of the project can be helpful, but your creative practice does not have to become a daily content-production job.

And despite the name, missing a day does not mean you have failed the 100 Day Project. You can pick it up again the next day. You can skip weekends. You can take 114 days to complete 100 drawings. Nobody is coming to inspect your sketchbook.

The best version of the project is probably one small enough that you can still do it on a tired, busy, uninspired day. Ten minutes. One page. One tiny drawing.

Then you do another one tomorrow.

Eventually, you have 100 pieces of art where you used to have a blank sketchbook and a plan you kept meaning to start.