*This was originally posted on 11 November 2016*

A lot of people have asked me why I decided to paint a watercolour everyday. What gave me the idea, why did I do it the way I did, and how (dear god how) was I driven to the point where I was willing to commit nearly 1000 hours of hard labour into an artistic project that could have been doomed to failure from the very start. So I though I would explain the origin story of the project, along with an overview of the processes involved in putting together an exhibition in a short series of blog posts.

The Beautiful Everyday project started as a way to expand my creative horizons. I had finished my Undergraduate and Masters degrees (English Literature and Eighteenth-Century Studies respectively), and was left feeling frustrated, bored, and without focus in the six month interlude between the completion of an internship and the start of my PhD studies. This creative frustration wasn't particularly new to me: I have always been a creative by nature, and thought nothing of filling a sketchbook from cover to cover in a matter of a few months. I lost a lot of my artistic focus during my late teens, which came hand-in-hand with a decline in motivation. My earlier work towards the end of my school career and the start of my undergraduate didn't help either - I was in awe of Georgia O'Keefe and produced massive botanical paintings which took up to 25 hours a piece. It is hard to retain motivation when you've got to write off your weekends to produce a painting that feels unoriginal and like a hollow imitation of someone else's voice.

To vary this I had a handful of commissions, drawing and sketching for friends, which I hugely enjoyed. But this work only brought home my insecurities that I had no voice of my own, and that I lacked the technical ability to tackle any variety of subject matter competently. This mood of artistic stagnation gave birth to my daily painting project. I wanted to make art an integral part of my everyday life. I wanted it to be un-intimidating; broken into small manageable chunks, but also to feel like I was making a monumental commitment to myself, that I would embrace and stop neglecting that creative side of my character. I also wanted to stretch my technical abilities, by working with subjects that I was uncomfortable with or that might never have occurred to me ordinarily. I could afford a few hours everyday, just the time it took to watch an episode or two of the latest BBC drama, or listen to a radio podcast. This meant my paintings had to be reduced in size, to be miniatures. It also meant I didn't have the time to learn about new mediums and materials - I was relatively comfortable with watercolours, and I knew they could give me the high level of detail I would need to bring to such little pieces. I practiced a few miniature paintings to check I had the technical ability, and that I was prepared to take this on.

I also wanted to ensure this project would be completed - the whole point was to do a painting a day for a whole year to force myself into a routine and to build up enough pieces that I would really challenge my knowledge and confidence in composition. It also wouldn't hurt to have something to do with all of these hundreds of paintings when I was finished. So I applied for and booked a gallery space for the following year, crossed my fingers and started painting on my 23rd birthday in July 2015.

I have written elsewhere on this site about the joys and challenges of these miniatures paintings, so I won't bore you with it again here. The project grew beyond my wildest hopes and gave me the freedom to try subjects I had never been brave enough to tackle before, and it demonstrated to me that a little work everyday adds up to a colossal number of hours.

Each piece took around 1-4 hours, with the majority taking around 1hr 30 from sketching out to completion. But of course, with the exhibition in September as the culminating finish line to this project, painting wasn't all the work I had to consider.

Read part 2 for behind the scenes pictures from the preparation and build-up towards my exhibition; and for a tale of long hours, exhaustion and extremely patient, long-suffering and magnificently generous friendship.

The Origin of the Beautiful Everyday Project