Mary Kate McDevitt’s 100 Days of People and Pets

Over the past 3 months, I’ve been watching with great enjoyment as illustrator Mary Kate McDevitt has shared super fun daily illustrations as part of the 100 Day Project. Each one is created with a playful innocence that many artists only hope to achieve with their work, and it has been a real thrill watching the project unfold, so I reached out to Mary Kate to get her perspective on the project.

See below for a selection of her personal favorites as well as some notes on the project in her own words:

I was talked into doing the 100 Day Project by my crazy talented friend, Melissa McFeeters who has a 100 Day Project of her own called #100daysofpapercutz. The official project was created by Elle Luna and The Great Discontent and kicked off April 6th but I didn’t join in till May 6th.

The idea behind the project was to challenge yourself in some way. I knew I could have done a lettering thing but I’ve been wanting to do more illustration and while it’s been trickling in my work here and there I rarely give myself the opportunity to work on new characters and all the fun stuff that comes with illustrating. To challenge myself even more, I decided to attach a mini story to each illustration. I knew just picking things to draw at random wouldn’t have kept it interesting enough for me to continue the entire 100 days.

With the first illustration I figured out my rules for the project:

• Only include 2 characters (birds are permitted)
• The characters initials must match
• Limited color palette
• It has to make me laugh (or giggle, or smile or smirk-whatever, I’m no comedian)
• The mini story should be kept to less than 10 words

Because I have to create one illustration a day, the process of creating them had to be simple, in the beginning I figured I could just scan and digitize my pencil drawings. That, however, proved to be too much work so I started working directly on my Cintiq that I had just bought for adding color and texture to my lettering illustrations. I basically come up with the idea and start drawing with very little sketching and try to get the wording of each story just right. I notice there are lots of little errors, which I don’t care to point out right now, but it feels so rewarding to create these little universes everyday.

Thanks to Mary Kate McDevitt for sharing her approach to the 100 Day Project. You can see her gorgeous illustration work here, and even take her incredible Hand Lettering class here.