Day 1: what's in your creative container? 🫙
it's the first day of #The100DayProject
Hello fellow creatives, artists, and dreamers!
My name is
and I run Creative Fuel, and I’m kicking off this first week of #The100DayProject!I would self-identify as someone who doesn’t really do well with daily practice. As a working artist, creativity and art certainly weave their way into my daily life in all kinds of ways, and I have routines and rituals that I am strict about. But a diligent and committed practice where I return to the same project or medium day after day? This isn’t me. A week-long endeavor feels manageable, and a month-long thing feels almost manageable, but even then I usually start to dwindle in the final days.
By default then, #The100DayProject isn’t the structure that works for me. And yet… for the last few years, every time the start date rolls around I embark on another project.
When Lindsay reached out and asked if I would write some guest newsletters for this first week, my initial reaction was to laugh hysterically. “You’re going to ask the woman who only managed to finish the project one single time, and even then it wasn’t with consecutive days?”
I said yes anyway. Why? Because every year that I have started a 100 day project—whether I have finished or not—it has helped me to better understand my own creative process and how I work at creating a container for it.
For me, this is the biggest takeaway because it has allowed me to expand what my creative container is.
Art by Anna Brones
What do I mean by creative container?
I mean structure that holds our entire creative process. The intention and purpose behind connecting the dots between our experiences and bringing a more creative lens to everything that we do.
This container holds more than just time at the desk, or the time working on a single project. It welcomes in all kinds of creative endeavors, and it supports the idea that creativity is an ongoing process that’s always with us.
Committing to regularity in our creative practice is what gives us the permission to build a container for that practice, and embarking on #the100DayProject does just that. With that in mind, we’re going to spend this week thinking about our own creative containers.
A few questions to get you started:
How would you define your creative practice? What are the most important elements of it?
Where do you see creativity in your life other than your art practice?
What do you need for your creative practice to feel nourished and supportive?
What habits and rituals feel like they serve your creativity?
How does your creativity serve you in other parts of your life?
Are you intentional about supporting your creative process and practice outside of your art-making time?
-Anna
 | A guest post by
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Thank you for this. I love that this year's project has kicked off my resetting the standard for what success might look like 100 days from now. Anna's idea of using the project to create and expand our container, rather than make it to an imagined finish line in 100 days is such an important reframe of the creative process - one I feel myself constantly wandaring away from and returning from.
What a perfect first post to start the project! As someone who has never completed a full 100 days, it's so nice to hear that from others too. I didn't attempt a project last year because the year before I felt like such a failure for only managing a week (I know, I know..). Last night though I flipped through all the little sketchbooks and mini books of my past "incomplete" projects and felt so happy, proud even, of what did get produced that it reminded me that doing something, anything, is good creative practice. Loved Anna's prompts, going to get a notebook and jot down some things now.