About The Everyday Art Project

Ben Smith | July 4, 2025

The true genesis of this project dates back to first-grade orientation when I was given a sheet of paper with a box, a ruler, and a pencil. The exact details of the assignment are fuzzy to me now all these years later, but I imaging that we were given a series of steps that had us mark increments on the bottom and right sides of the box. Labeling each increment, then taking the ruler and drawing a straight line to each matching number. The resultant image is a low-poly curved line made out of nothing but straight lines. As a five-year-old, this blew my mind.

Over the following years, I revisited this idea with new implementations of this same idea. In fourth grade, we had some simple art projects that built on this idea, reminding me of this technique, but ultimately, I didn't do much with it. In my freshman year of high school, I took an art class and we had a unit on Op (Optical) Art and I absolutely loved it. I spent at least 15 hours on the unit project, painstakingly using a ruler, pencil, and ton of sharpies on an A3 paper. This is the only art work that I made as a kid that I still have to this day and I keep it hung in my office.

It was around this time that I realized that if I wanted to do more of this style of art, doing them digitally would make it significantly easier and less time consuming. That being said, at this point in my life, I knew very little about the digital art and design tools available and so not long after this project, my desire to create art faded into the background of youth once more.

Cut to December of 2020. I was home from my first semester of college and I had a few weeks to spend time with family for the holidays. I don't know if there was something in particular that reminded me of enjoying this art style or if it was a product of boredom from a lack of homework; I decided to download the free image editor GIMP. I spent the next few weeks playing around with it and making simple art work largely based on the same principles as the assignment I did in first-grade.

It was a good learning experience for me, I created a few dozen of art pieces in GIMP over the next month. After seeing my interest in this artwork, my dad suggested I use Adobe Illustrator instead. He helped me get set up and it was the best tool change I could have made.

I remember sitting in the study areas before and after class at Boise State University working on my first project in Illustrator. Flipping from a raster to a vector application was a mind bending change at first. My first art piece in Illustrator took around 8 hours to complete. Despite this, I absolutely loved the whole process.

It only took a couple of weeks of creating artwork in Illustrator for me to fall in love with the application and the design process. I was spending my free time watching tutorials, learning and testing new tools in the application, and trying to make new things I had only dreamed of making before. I created another dozen art pieces over the course of the next few months, through early March 2021.

At some point during early 2021, I came across Beeple who had recently crossed the 5000 day mark on his Everyday journey. The goal of his journey was to start and finish something new each and every day. This idea got stuck in my mind. I thought it would be a cool way to learn the principles of art better and would give a portfolio as I went. On March 22, 2021, I started my everyday journey.

As I was starting out, I didn't give much thought to how long I would be doing it for. I figured I would give up or get bored at some point. I remember thinking after Day 100 that I might want to take a break but decided to give it at least another 100 days. It's been over four years, and I am still making new artwork everyday.

Back when my wife and I were dating, she would often say that I couldn't be done with my artwork until I reach day 20,000 in a little over 50 years. I don't know where this project will go, but I am happy with how things have turned out so far and I look forward to seeing where this project takes me going forward.