What Happens If I Paint Every Day for 100 Days?
There are exactly 100 days left in 2026. I know this because I saw someone mention it, not because I am the kind of person who sits around calculating how many days are left until December 31.
My first thought was that I should do something with those 100 days. My second thought was that I am historically not great at these kinds of things. Give me a 30-day challenge, a 100-day project, a daily anything, and there is a decent chance I will start out wildly enthusiastic, make a whole plan for it, possibly buy supplies I absolutely did not need, and then quietly wander off somewhere around Day 11.
So naturally, I decided to do a 100-day project.
I’ve been playing with watercolor more lately, and while I really enjoy it, I’m still very much learning how to use it. Watercolor behaves differently from the other media I work with, and sometimes I know what I want something to look like without the slightest idea of how to make the paint actually do that.
I could keep experimenting on my own and probably figure a lot of it out eventually, but I also have access to Skillshare and found a watercolor class I want to work through. Instead of trying to come up with 100 original paintings while I’m still learning the medium, I’m going to follow along with the lessons and tutorials and let someone who knows what they’re doing teach me a few things.
That means this isn’t really about creating 100 finished pieces of art. I’m not trying to make a collection, fill my shop with 100 new products, or prove that I can produce something amazing every single day. The point is much simpler than that: I want to get more comfortable with watercolor, and the best way to do that is probably to actually use watercolor. A lot.
For the next 100 days, I’m going to try to sit down every day and paint something. Especially in the beginning, many of those paintings will come directly from the tutorials I’m following. I’ll be practicing techniques, learning how much water to use, figuring out how colors behave together, making muddy little disasters, and hopefully getting a little less precious about whether every painting turns out the way I imagined.
As I get more comfortable, I may start applying what I’m learning to my own subjects and ideas. I don’t really know yet, and that’s part of why I don’t want to over-plan this. I have plenty of creative projects where I already know what the finished thing needs to become. This doesn’t need to be one of them.
There are still a few rules, mostly because I know myself. I’m going to make time for watercolor every day, but it doesn’t have to be good, and it doesn’t have to become anything. Some days might produce an actual little painting. Other days might be color mixing, brush practice, leaves, shapes, or whatever the lesson happens to be.
And if I miss a day, I am not turning the next day into watercolor debt. I’m not painting six mushrooms on Thursday because Tuesday went sideways. I’ll just pick it back up and keep going.
I’m also absolutely not writing 100 blog posts about this because nobody needs that, including me. Instead, I’m going to share a recap here once a week with what I’ve been working on, what I’m learning, what frustrated me, what finally clicked, and probably a few things that went spectacularly sideways.
By the end of December, I’d love to be able to put the first week’s paintings next to the last week’s paintings and actually see the difference. Not because I expect to magically master watercolor in 100 days, but because I want to see what happens when I stop worrying quite so much about how to do it and give myself 100 days to learn by doing.
Let’s see what happens.
