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.