Are you ready?
The 100 Day Project starts tomorrow! I’ll be participating for the 3rd year in a row.

To be perfectly honest, I’m a little nervous about it.
When I first did it a couple of years ago, I had no idea what to expect.
“No expectations” is a beautiful thing.
There’s only one time like that… you know, like the first time you go to a new exercise class… or get the glaucoma test!

I’m making it sound horrible. It’s sooo not.
It’s like the first time at Disney World with all your friends!!!!

But this being my THIRD time on this ride, I have expectations for myself.
It’s a bit harder to set those aside and not think about the end rather than being in the moment.

I want it to be as fun as last time.
I want to learn something.
I want my collection to reflect my growth… blah, blah, blah.

I share all this because perhaps some of you are feeling some trepidation about committing to 100 days.
And I want you to know you’re not alone.
And yet, I’m gonna do it… because the decisions that have been most forwarding for me are the ones that I say, “What the heck? Why not?!”

So ready or not… 100 days begins tomorrow! Let’s do this thing. Let’s connect on instagram… leave a comment on this image with your #hashtag so I can follow your 100 days too. I’ll post mine in the morning.

Are you a little, teeny-tiny bit scared of drawing people? Me too!!!
As you know, I  make it a habit not to get too comfortable so no surprise, I’m hosting a free workshop on Skillshare!

Nothing like 10 days of Selfies to get you all loosened up about portraits, self-portraits no less.

C’mon! I’ll send you daily prompts starting on Tuesday, May 3 to make it fun. We’ll all post our selfies on Insta. And at the end of the whole thing, I’ll post the whole collection here so we can all give ourselves virtual cheers and hugs!

Deets:
May 3-12
1 prompt a day
30 minutes a day
10 selfies total

Join here, yes?

p.s. It’s a free workshop but you might need Skillshare Premium. In which case, you can get a new Skillshare Premium membership for 99 cents for 3 months with this link, more than enough to do the workshop and check out all sorts of fun Skillshare classes.

Are you ready?

#THE100DAYPROJECT is a free and open project for anyone who is hungry to jump-start their creative practice, who is curious about being a part of a supportive, nurturing community that celebrates the process, and those who are busy busy busy (??) and searching for a bite-sized way to nurture their creativity! Is this you? If so, you’re in the right spot! @peterrific.ph & @gizemicplanets shared this great overview, which I want to share with you: ✔️ Choose your action (an action you will repeat for 100 days) ✔️ Find a unique hashtag for your project, like #100daysof… (This is very important. Choose your own so that you can have all of your work under one hashtag) ✔️ Announce your project on Instagram with your hashtag and #THE100DAYPROJECT hashtag ? Begin Tuesday, April 19th! What will you do with ? days of making? We can’t wait to see! Please share this post! ?

A photo posted by elle luna (@elleluna) on Apr 6, 2016 at 5:22am PDT

I’ve written about this before and I’m sure I will again (every time I need the reminder myself)…

Style, for any artist I’ve ever met, is a THING. We obsess about finding our unique voice, what makes us different, because for some reason that is the validation we need to keep making art. I could go down several tangents here but I’m going to attempt to stay focused…

Let’s try this one, if just for the next five minutes: you already have a style. Period. No more discussion. Do you like it? Is it good enough? Do other people like it? Is there a market for it? It might very well be that these issues are still be TBD.

You already have a unique style because you are the only one who is you. I believe it was illustrator, Melissa Sweet who said that style is your unique take on the world. This unique take is formed by both nature and nurture — your family of origin, your experiences, the places you’ve been and the places you haven’t been, the relationships you’ve had, your physical quirks, your taste in music and movies, the people you hang with, and on and on…. all the things that make up “you.” Can you see how the chances of someone else having the exact same worldview is rather slim?

Let’s take my recent experience as an example. I just completed Month 1 of Lilla Roger’s Bootcamp. The assignment was to design a 1920’s-inspired coloring book cover. My submission was a coloring book featuring women from various eras and what their daily lives were like during that period. I made some sketches…
My final art was the result of a week of sketching and musing on the assignment.

• I thought of my grandmother, who was a girl in the 20’s.

• If you look at my sketches and my portfolio you can see that there’s a way that a draw people and faces that’s just… the way I draw them.

• I have a habit of imposing narratives on my work so of course I had to create a larger story for the assignment.

• I wanted to learn something about the time period and research about women’s experiences.

As I prepared to submit my piece, there’s a part of me that couldn’t imagine a different solution. And yet, of course, there were as many solutions as people in the class (over 300!). As I looked in the gallery, I thought to myself, “I would never have thought to do that!” Of course not! Because I’m not them and they’re not me.

My illustration reflects my habits and my take on the world—my style.

Thought for today: hang in there, grasshopper! Just do what you do!

Sorry little green guy. I love you. But the fate of the world does not rest on whether or not I make good art. For me, trying is… everything!

Case in point… I’ve been dreaming about this little kingfisher for a long time. I was dreaming about how I would paint each color separately and collage them all together. Last weekend, I finally had a chance to do it for real. So here it is.

It doesn’t look like I thought it would but I’m posting it anyway because it makes a point, one that I think most of us know but don’t really feel until we feel it ourselves and then it feels crappy (ha!): not every project is going to work out, even if you plan and practice and think through the whole thing.

You can do the very best you are capable of at any time and it might just not be how you want it to be for some reason. It’s okay to try. It was worth it anyway. Because now you know and that piece of insight is invaluable to your growth as an artist.

Thank you to everyone who liked it and said it was beautiful and it’s not that I don’t think it is. The whole thing — the process, the product — just doesn’t light me up as much as thinking about it did. That’s my litmus test for whether I should do it again — not so much if other people liked it but if I want to spend my time creating another and another and another using that same technique.

The experience reinforced what I do know about myself, that I am a learn-by-doing person. If I didn’t sit down and actually make this piece, it would have stayed in my “theoretical” column, calling to me until I did it. Now I can put that one aside and move on to the next thing that I’ve been curious and dreaming about.

So if you’re like me, you can take the pressure off. If there’s something that you’re curious about but are afraid because it might not work out the way you want, just do try it already.

I’m a duck… you know, those things (not the bird) that you can drive on land and in the water.

I spend a majority of my day at a job AND a good chunk being an artist/illustrator.

But all of the time, I feel like a unicorn because while most of my artist friends are counting the days until they can quit, I feel too guilty to say too loudly, “I really like my job.”

Of course, it keeps the lights on… and that’s a good thing. But there are a lot of other, not-so-tangible benefits of my job — things that I can’t get from my art practice, that actually feed my art practice.

So what does my job provide (other than income)?

1. Interaction with actual humans in real life
The day-to-day existence of an artist can be really isolating. When I go to work, I get to interact and collaborate with real people and dialogue with someone other than myself. I get the benefit from the richness of different perspectives. Generally, those other people are nicer and kinder than I am, to me. Har!

Overheard in the “conference room in my brain” can sometimes be a lot of “What were you thinking?!”

2. A place to go
… that doesn’t have a giant pile of laundry on the floor and a (pretty) good HVAC system, a much speedier internet connection and a cleaning staff… and did I mention my co-workers?

3. Consistency
Sometimes you don’t feel like going to work but you still have to.
Sometimes you don’t want to go to a meeting but you still have to.
Sometimes you don’t want to work with… whoever… but you still have to.
This is a mindset that can make all the difference in any pursuit, whether it’s “creative” or not.

There’s this notion that you can only be creative when you’re in a creative mood.
I don’t buy it… for myself anyway because I totally used to buy it… as an awesome excuse for avoiding what was right in front of me.

Leigh Medeiros said, “I learned that sometimes when you really, really don’t feel like making anything, you make your best work.” This really struck a chord with me.

4. Structure
… some people bristle at the thought but I thrive on it.

I went away for a week’s vacation, I didn’t touch a paintbrush for the first three days. I started to question my commitment to my art!!! How is it that I can whip out something in an hour after work before the sun goes down but when I have wide open day…. bluuuurgh.

Perhaps it’s my parochial school upbringing.
The routine feeds my creativity.
I also love uniforms!
I told you, I’m a unicorn… in a uniform!

It’s almost September and I’ve managed to keep my New Year’s Resolution this year: make art every day. That’s gotta be saying something, right? 9 months! That’s how long it takes to grow a human!

What’s bubbling up for me now is sharing it.

I was at the bookstore a few weeks ago, wandering around the stationery section. You would think that would be a delightful experience. In fact, I went with the intention of that being my little treat for myself that week, my artist’s date, if you will. Instead, I was totally deflated. Everything was awesome and beautiful and I left feeling very inadequate.

But then I got to thinking, it’s like the Facebook phenomena… you know how everyone’s life looks awesome on Facebook? Nobody posts all the crap — myself included. Even if it’s not crap, nobody posts everything!!! I think this is the reason for the proliferation of OSS (overnight success syndrome). Zero to famous, overnight when we all know that’s not exactly true.

Since I’m all about process, not product, I’ve decided I’m going to post everything, regardless of whether or not it’s Facebook-worthy… even my 30-second sketches! So if you’re interested in all the behind the scenes stuff and want to see where ideas begin (and where most ideas are likely to die), if you want to be inspired by far from perfect work and an almost always messy studio, you’ve come to the right place.

Do you have a unique style?
I admire artists I know whose style is instantly recognizable that I don’t even have to see their name to know that an image/illustration is theirs. Sharon Derry of Secret Leaves is like this for me and Melissa Sweet and Kim Klassen.

I aspire to that.
Maybe it’s just me but I actually feel a certain amount of pressure to find it already, dammit!

It’s a bit of an existential crisis because for us creatives, our art is so personal, such an extension of ourselves that this whole “style” discourse is actually an on-the-ground way of asking the ultimate questions: Who am I? What is my purpose?

These days, I’m finding a lot of comfort in the words of Bayles and Orland in Art and Fear:

The unconsidered gesture, the repeated phrasing, the automatic selection, the characteristic reaction to subject matter and materials—these are the very things we refer to as style. Lots of people, artists included, consider this a virtue. Viewed closely, however, style is not a virtue, it is an inevitability—the inescapable result of doing anything more than a few times.

Novel, right? They say, “Style is the natural consequence of habit.”

What if it’s that obvious?
What if there’s no need to search because there’s nothing to find:
Your unique style is the natural result of what you do over and over.

What happens if you apply this metaphor to that ultimate question:
Your unique self/life is the result of what you do over and over.

Left to right: 1994, 2004, 2015

Life is a sum of all your choices. ~ Camus

There’s a moment in the hero’s journey that people sometimes forget. It’s called the first threshold.

I’ve observed that change of any sort is a hero (or heroine’s) journey. You commit yourself to losing weight, learning how to tango, quit smoking, make art…. In big and small ways, we are attempting to leave our old familiar selves behind.

So if you Google “hero’s journey” you’ll find out that the first threshold is the point of no return for Luke Skywalker or Bilbo Baggins or whoever (you/me). You’re really gonna do this thing! You’re burning the boats, so to speak! But in all the search results, you might have overlooked the references to the threshold guardian.

Wuh?

In the action adventure story, the threshold guardian is especially important for moving the plot along and keeping moviegoers in their seats. It might be something exciting like, say, … a dragon.

In our personal journeys, let’s face it, it’s just a pain in the bum. It’s the thing that makes you question why you ever wanted to do this dance/art/healthy living thing in the first place. It’s the force that will test our commitment and desire for whatever it is that is sending us on our journey instead of staying in our comfy reading chair in the Shire otherwise known as the status quo..

My dragon comes in the form of my inner wet blanket who says, Why are you doing this again? Why would anyone care? You know there are a hundred million artists and illustrators… not to mention bloggers, creativity coaches, urban sketchers etcetera in the world already, right? What, exactly, are you doing anyway? Whatever it is, you know it’s already been done. And of course, is this even any good?

It’s a familiar foe, that one: fear.

Why am I sharing all this? Because I’m a geek. And because I’m trying to talk myself back on the horse to slay the dragon.

A friend of mine once told me, there’s nothing like action to give fear the middle finger.

So despite the internal snorting and puffs of smoke, I’m just going to keep making art every day.

Onward.

This is my response for Day 1 of the Wide Open eCourse. The subject: Lost. You can follow the body of work for this class with #wideopencourse on Instagram.

This was tougher for me to discern — not that I don’t need. I do. But is it time? Stillness? Space? Calm? Peace? There are so many things that I need… I would never be able to pick just one for my luxury item on Survivor! ;P

After contemplating this for much of today, I’ve decided vulnerability requires a need that I feel guilt or shame to admit; something I need and yet another part of me judges for needing. You know, all the others are “acceptable needs” or “of-course-don’t-we-all” needs. So… the need that I reject is: BEAUTY.

What counts, in making art, is the actual fit between the contents of your head and the qualities of your materials. The knowledge you need to make that fit comes from noticing what really happens as you work — the way the materials respond, and the way that response (and resistance) suggests new ideas to you. ~ David Bayles and Ted Orland

Allowing the paint to lead today.

10. The more you make, the easier it gets.

9. The more you make, the better it gets.

8. The more you make, the more confident you are that you can make the next thing.

7. Themes start to emerge (and other things start to fall away)

6. You develop some “muscle memory.”

5. You don’t take each thing too seriously.

4. You start to take yourself more seriously.

3. Other people start to take you more seriously.

2. You still have a brief moment of panic before you start anything.

1. You start calling yourself an artist.

(Top image: Day 70 of my 100 Day Project. Bottom image: Day 1)