Last summer, I set out to complete my first hundred day challenge and decided to start with vector illustrations for a few reasons:
🎨 To improve my illustration skills
🖋 To get more proficient with the pen tool
🎯 To set a big goal and stick to it
So what did I learn?
There’s no right time to start. Start anyway. I wasted a few months just waiting for the perfect time to get started. Y’know, just a 3 month+ block of time where I wouldn’t be traveling or busy with any other possible commitments. Right. Because that exists. Turns out there’s no such thing as the perfect time to start something like this. The trick to finishing is to get started anyway.
That being said, late May ended up being a pretty awful time to start the challenge. My summer seemed fairly open at that point, but then I enrolled in a drawing class at my local community college, became friends with a few of my neighbors and spent most of my evenings hanging out with them, and oh, yeah, made the impulsive decision to move to a new apartment. Life got a little hectic.
I should have planned…a little more than I did.
I started with a general idea for some of the illustrations I wanted to do and figured I’d just get inspired with other ideas along the way.
A lot of days I ended up drawing something based on what I’d done that day, or because it was some sort of holiday. On the one hand, it’s kind of cool to look back and remember how much fun I had at the Oregon Brewers Festival on day 47 or that my cat’s birthday was on day 54. But there were also many, many days when I found myself sitting in front of the computer at 10pm trying to figure out what in the heck I should draw.
If I were to do the challenge again, I’d make more of an effort to plan my illustrations, or at least determine a set of themes I could follow — 10 days of food, 10 days of animals, etc. It would have made getting started each day easier and would have made for a more cohesive end product.
Motivation is fickle.
Sticking with this challenge was tougher than I expected. Most days I didn’t get around to starting the illustration until late in the evening. It started feeling like an obligation…something I had to cross off my list so I could go to bed. There were a lot of days where I just decided to phone it in and do something simple. Which in turn made it even harder to stay motivated because I felt like I wasn’t challenging myself or improving my skills so what was the point? Looking back over the illustrations I created, it’s clear that my skills did improve over time. More importantly, though, I no longer view illustrating as something I’m incapable of doing. Now when I need an illustration for a project I have the confidence that I can create something at least passable.
There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finishing.
I didn’t finish the challenge in 100 days. There were a handful of days I ended up skipping due to moving, camping, being sick, etc. But I did finish — just a few weeks later than anticipated. And I gotta tell you, the sense of accomplishment I got was incredible.
Spending 100 days actively practicing a craft is one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done.
We all know that practice and consistency are the keys to improving any skill, yet it’s so easy to let our time slip away watching Netflix and scrolling social media instead. Finishing the challenge taught me that I have what it takes to spend time growing my skills every single day and that it’s something worth prioritizing. I knew even before I finished that my first hundred day challenge would not be my last.
Originally published on Medium