2026 100 Day Project: Days 8-14

March 8, 2026 Kris Baker Comments 0 Comment

Here we are, 14% of the way through this year’s !00 Day Project. So far, I am really enjoying my project this year. I actually look forward to the time each day when I am able to sit down, slow down, and turn meditation into collage and collage into meditation. Even with past projects that I have loved the finished product, I can say that there were many days that I didn’t look forward to the daily doing. Honestly, those projects may have been better for me in the long run as the real lesson of The 100 Day Project is to do something every day without judging the daily product. Right now, I am having a ball with paper and glue. Hopefully that will continue!

This week, I thought I’d share a bit about my process.

My first step is to intentionally move to my creative space. For me, that involves getting my body and my mind in the right place. I take a few minutes to settle my thoughts and think about my day. I almost always make the meditative collages at night so I am thinking about my day in retrospect. Once I have slowed my mind, my heart takes over the creative process.

This is how each daily collage begins–a blank page, a basic of paper “scraps”, and a glue stick.

The basket of scraps is an ongoing collection of miscellaneous small pieces of mostly watercolor paper that contain paint color swatches, pieces where I’ve cleaned a brush, ends cut off from previous work, samples where I have tried a new technique or a new brush, and small pieces where I have doodled, primarily in black ink. None of these things in this basket were ever intended to be something on their own. Many of them probably should have gone to the trash can rather than this basket. However, hrough the creation of these collages, each has a the chance to become something meaningful and beautiful, at least to me.

I begin each Meditation by thumbing through the basket, pulling out pieces that speak to me on that day. Sometimes a particular color draws my attention. Sometimes it is a shape. Other times I have no idea why I initially pulled a piece. At this stage, I try not to think too much about my choices. Once I feel like I have a sufficient collection with which to work, the real meditative process begins. It is at this point that I begin to meditate on why I chose each individual piece. The “why” here isn’t necessarily profound, but the question is an integral part of the process. Pondering the individual pieces, their color, pattern, texture, and shape, leads me to seeing how to join several of them into one unified and meaningful meditation. At this point, I often cut and reshape the individual pieces to help me allow the composition to speak more clearly.

Once the day’s collage is finished, the several pieces now one, I take time to further medidate on the final piece. It is true that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

One observation I have made about my work this week is that subconsciously, I have achieved some kind of harmony between the meditations on adjacent pages. That was not part of my plan, but it is how things seemed to go this week. We’ll see if that continues.