100 Days Project: the Conclusion

Last month I concluded the 100 Days Project.  If you aren't familiar with the project, it takes place on Instagram and hundreds (thousands?) of creatives participate in their own way.  Before the project begins, each creative decides what he or she is going to do every day for 100 days, dreams up a unique hashtag (so others can easily follow along), and posts every day about what they did that day.  It's a strenuous project, to say the least.  100 days is a long time and it is so easy to forget or not have time in a day.

I tried this project last year and I'm pretty sure I didn't even make it to 30 days, but this year I completed it!  I chose to focus on creating color palettes every day.  I wanted to do this because I've been more interested in finding interesting color combinations and I knew that if I was super short on time, I could put together a palette in just a couple of minutes.

To do this, I used the Adobe Capture app.  I would either use a photo or walk around where ever I was to find an interesting palette.  The app is incredibly intuitive and very easy to use.  I highly recommend it if you're interested in saving some color palettes too.

To create this photos for Instagram, I took a screen shot of my phone BEFORE I saved the color palette.  This preserved the little circles showing where I took the color.  After you save it, there will still be the photo for reference, but not the circles.  Since the screen shot is too big for Instagram, I used the Instagram layout app to size it down.  I used the screen shot twice and picked a layout that had a bigger portion on top of a smaller portion.  I adjusted the palette and the photo until I was happy with it and then took it back over to Instagram to post.  See?  Easy!

Through this project, I found some beautiful color palettes in some unexpected places and that was the big take away for me.  These palettes also helped some of my friends and followers find palettes in unexpected places, too, and that was an awesome bonus to this project!  Look around friends, the world will surprise you.

August Inspiration

When I was in Washington D.C. in June, I spent a lot of time looking at maps.  I was always trying to find where I was or how far a restaurant or museum was from the hotel.  As I spent so much time looking at a map, I noticed how lovely the grid was and the visual interest that was created when streets took an unexpected turn or a landmark fell out of the prescribed "grid".  D.C. is especially full of circles and diagonal streets, which made the map that much more lovely.

During the 29 Days of Free Art project that I did last month, I created a graphic map of downtown Salt Lake City.  I liked the meditative process of drawing the grid and then the painstaking process of making sure each street was where it should be.  "That's State Street.  No, that's Main.  No, no, I was right, it's State."  These are a few of the reasons that I have decided to make maps for this months collection, but I also have a few questions to that I want to answer.

It should be a great month and I can't wait to create maps for some fun locations!