100 Days, 200 Cats
Scrolling through grad school course catalogue late one night - I found a class that piqued my interest - 100 days of making. Like the name suggests - you have to make something every day for 100 days - no late work, no exceptions.
I had seen a few examples of the class floating around the web in the past year and thought the idea was so cool, and so wholly unnecessary as a graduate school course that you pay thousands of dollars for. And it made me think of whether I would have the fortitude to complete such a challenge.
I expressed as much to my friend Lucy who also shared in my admiration for the class. And what she said next would change my life forever:
Yeah uh I feel like the only thing I could do for 100 days is like draw a cat lol
And thus @100days200cats was born.
100days200cats
The rules were simple, by 11:59:59 PST, Lucy and I both needed to upload a picture of a cat we had created that day. No excuses.
It started out simple enough - cats sketched in my notebook with a fine tipped pen. I found the simplicity of a single writing instrument on a single type of canvas gave me a lot of room to focus on the forms of different cats. And as someone who has struggled to draw for my whole life, I needed a long time to work on the basics.
Day 1 - The first cat I drew on October 9th, 2024
The next big development came only a week later, when I tore two ankle ligaments while climbing in Texas. A one week trip to visit my family turned into a multi-month stay, and cat drawing went from a part-time gig to a full time job. Unable to walk, I spent a lot of time in bed or on the couch, filling up the pages of my notebook with cat drawings as I mindlessly binged season after season of Psych on Peacock.
After 50 days - I decided to switch from physical to digital drawings. I used the desktop program Affinity Designer to experiment with colors, brushes and vectors.
Day 51 - my first digital drawing on my laptop
Once I finished surgery and went back to New York (and could start hobbling on two legs again), I finally had access to my iPad and Apple Pencil. I bought Procreate - a drawing app for iPad which opened up a whole new avenue for creative expression and play.
Day 61 - my first procreate sketch
When I settled back into real life in New York - going to the office, seeing a physical therapist, catching up with friends - the full difficulty of the challenge became apparent. I squeezed in drawing time between meetings, on the subway, and late at night seconds before 3am EST to hit my deadline. And in the last 30 days the challenge really intensified. Throughout the holidays I traveled between NYC -> Texas -> Qatar -> Malaysia -> Singapore -> Australia -> San Francisco. But throughout all the flights and all the time zones, I kept posting.
Day 97 - one of 3 times I missed a post - I bought in-flight wifi from Australia to San Francisco but it didn’t work and 11:59 PST came and went without a cat drawing.
And finally, 100 days later, the 100th cat came.
My 100th cat
Reflections
As the project ended, there were 5 lessons that I took away from 100days200cats
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You get better when you do something every day
Ok duh. But I was genuinely shocked at how much I improved when I consistently drew every day. Like I mentioned earlier, my drawing skills were practically nonexistent, and this was by far the most amount of drawings I had ever done in my life. Even though the quality and effort still varied day by day, I got more confident both with my tools, and with my style as the weeks progressed.
Having the limitation of drawing the same subject every day let me experiment more with the form and the medium that the cat existed in. I tried pencils, pens, digital, 3D modeling, perler beads, sand, and more! I experimented a lot with different digital brushes, and had a lot of fun exploring the wide world of creative tools.
One of my personal favorite drawings was day 74, where I drew a cat using FigJam for iPad - an app whose drawing tools I had personally worked on during my time at Figma. Using these tools my team and I had spent nearly a year working on to make my own creative work was so weirdly touching I found myself tearing up while working on my silly cat drawing.
“Day 74 - ‘Puter cat”
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Taking the journey with someone else makes a big difference
To be honest, I had long considered undertaking a 100day journey all on my own, but was scared to be seen trying, or worse, to be seen failing before the 100 days were up. Collaborating on this project with Lucy made me feel not alone, and pushed me to make better, more creative work. There were many nights where the deadline was mere minutes away, and one of us would call the other, frantically reminding them to post.
And even on the days when we didn’t call, there was something comforting about knowing that we could be across the world from each other, but we still both have a cat drawn at the end of the day. Some days we decided to have specific themes, like ASCII art, pixel art, or a comic - and sometimes Lucys post would inspire me to make one in a similar theme.
I don’t know if I would have finished the project without her. Even when I was at my lowest motivation, seeing Lucy’s post every day reminded me that if I failed I wouldn’t just be giving up on myself, I would be letting her down. I feel very lucky that I found someone who would take this silly project as seriously as me.
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People will support you
So many friends also enjoyed following along in the fun. Seeing my friends comment, share, and send in cat drawing requests was one of the best parts of the projects. Anytime someone asked me what I was up to - I would pull up the Instagram account and show them - imploring them to follow. And while a few people didn’t get it or thought it was a bit silly at the beginning, most were overwhelmingly supportive and followed along for the reminder of the 100 days.
And while the follower count never even broke 100, the support of even a few people went a long way. It’s so special to have people show up for you, even if it’s in the comments of a silly cat drawing Instagram account.
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You will get anxious
I can’t tell you the number of times I laid down for a nap, only to shoot straight up when I realized that I hadn’t drawn my cat for the day. Many times I was out with friends, having a good time, when I realized with a start that I had less than an hour left to draw my cat.
One of my closest calls was hanging out with my friends at Insomnia Cookies (a famously late-night cookie joint), when I got a text from Lucy reminding me the deadline was coming up. I had no paper, no pen, and was on crutches. I asked the cashier for a pen and used the receipt to draw a few different versions of a tiny cookie cat - hitting upload with 6 minutes to spare.
Day 17
This anxiety was one of the main reasons I was not reluctant to call the project finished. It was a type of anxiety I had not really felt since my days of using Canvas at UT Austin or in high school - the dread that hits the pit of your stomach when you realized you forgot a deadline, and the inability to fully relax once the clock got close to midnight.
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You will be sad when it’s over
The most surprising thing, however, was just how impactful the project was to me. Life is what you focus on, and how you spend your days is how you spend your life. It embodied all of my favorite parts of being alive - learning something new, and creating things that could be shared and cherished by my friends and family. I got used to having a fun experience throughout the day and immediately thinking about how I could represent it in cat form. Picking the perfect song to match my daily mood and coming up with a funny caption gave me a second to reflect at the end of each day.
This particular 100 days were some of the most chaotic of my life. I broke my ankle, saw old friends, had surgery, traveled to 4 new countries, applied to grad school, and more. And through all the chaos, my daily cats kept me grounded. It changed the way I experienced the length of a day, and became a daily ritual in my unstructured life.
Cat Party
To wrap up the 100 days, Lucy and I knew that we wanted to have a Cat Party. What this meant, we didn’t really know. However, the cold nyc weather and our small studio apartments meant that we didn’t have a great place to host it, and we put it on hold until, finally, we scheduled it for July 4th, 2025. The weather looked great, the patriotism was high, and it was my final weekend before starting grad school.
We went all out. The morning of I ran around the city trying to find a cat cookie cutter. I went to NY Cake, Michaels, Target, AND Whole Foods before trying Village Party Store (1 block from my apartment). I was reluctant to go because they had no animal cookie cutters in their online inventory. When I got there I was directed to a haphazard stack of merchandize that was unsorted, and covered in a thick layer of dust. I dug through the boxes before finding the cutest set of cat cookie cutters wedged underneath the shelving units, below 4 feet of junk.
Lucy brought a cat onigiri set and we got to work on the snacks, In addition we brought custom stickers of our favorite cats from the project, and 2 posters divided into 100 numbered squares each, so our friends could collaboratively draw 200 cats.
Calico cat cookies in McCarren park
Cat tofu onigiri on cat plates
It was a terrific turnout and the best party that I had ever hosted, We had over 30 people show up and completely finished all 200 cats on a beautiful NYC summer day.
I swear we had more people we just forgot to take this picture until the very end
The cat posters now hang in me and Lucy’s apartment
Someone even brought their real life cat to the party! It was like a celebrity sighting
100cats Fursonality Test
The one other element I brought to the party was a handmade fursonality test! I chose my favorite 20 cats from the project (10 by me, 10 by Lucy), and created a 5 question quiz that could assign each of our friends to one of the cats.
I kept the design bare bones, and focused instead on crafting interesting questions that would split the user base into 50/50. I thought about what type of person would answer each permutation of questions and tried to map them to a cat that would in some way represent them. I made everyone at the party take the quiz, and have since made many more of my friends take it to see which cat they got. People love taking quizzes, and I have not yet had anyone turn down the offer.
My answers - of course I got the Puter Cat
I think I have seen people get every single possible cat - which to me meant the questions were a success! People compared results and started debates when their friends answered a question differently than them. There are so many other ideas that Lucy and I have for using the 200 cats we’ve drawn, but the personality test was a fun way to give each cat a little more color.
Conclusion
I would love for the @100days200cats account to become something like “sisterhood of the traveling pants”, where 2 more friends take it over for 100days and continue the cat drawings. No one has taken me up on that offer but if you and a friend are interested, please send me a DM or email!
If you’ve read this far, I hope you leave thinking about something you could do for 100 days. Don’t think too much about it and start now! The rest will follow :3