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If a picture’s worth a thousand words and every heart has a song, then The April Project is certainly the window to the souls of two local artists.

The April Project is a 30-day multimedia art experiment between Lawrence photographer Sarah Link and Kansas City musician Mat Shoare.

The challenge? Post an original song and photo for each day of the month of April. The rules? The art must be created that day, posted to the project’s host site by midnight every night, and no friends can directly influence or help create the work. That last clause includes the collaborators themselves, meaning the photos and songs were created independently from each other, with Link and Shoare not discussing their day’s final products with each other before putting them together.

The results of a month of art crammed between papers, tests, jobs and side

projects for the two college sophomores can be seen at theaprilproject.tumblr.com.

The site is a streaming collage of days, summed up with the cool tones of black-and-white images and music that is alternately playful, contemplative and representative of our modern world. The photos are warm, homey slice-of-life shots that play with light and everyday objects — a cat, a mirror, a desk, a fan, etc. Meanwhile, the songs capture both the day-to-day life of a college kid — topics include sitting next to a girl in class and seeing the evolution of friends’ weight gain on Facebook — to serious time-capsule subjects like the plane crash April 10 that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski.

It’s just all in a day’s work for the pair, and it was work.

“Sometimes it’s painful,” says Shoare, a music and composition student in the conservatory at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “Some days it barely happens, and some days I’m not doing anything all day and I’m putting layers of instruments on there. It’s always really different.”

The project started on a whim after Link, a Kansas University photography student, was told by a professional photographer that if she really was interested in photography, a great exercise would be to take a picture a day, no matter the circumstances.

“And I said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t sound hard,'” she says. “And so I started in March and I didn’t really put a lot of effort into it, I just kind of went through my day and snapped pictures, wouldn’t edit it or anything.”

Link mentioned her personal project to high school buddy Shoare, who happened to be tossing around a similar idea of trying to write 30 songs in 30 days as a way to stretch his musical creativity. They hit the ground running, putting up the blog in the wee hours of April 1, and, by the month’s final week, both were feeling stretched thin for sure, in a good way: Their art had become clearer from the outside looking in.

“I guess I always thought that for photos (or art in general) to be cohesive, they had to revolve around the same subject or simply focus on a single subject, but this has taught me that sometimes art can take on its own theme and personality in a very organic way,” Link says.

For Shoare, the grind of not only recording a song daily but also writing music and lyrics for one every 24 hours meant he also had to let go of who he thought he was as an artist.

“Sometimes I would write a song like one that I may have posted this month but I would just think, ‘Oh, that’s not really my style’ or ‘That’s not what I usually do,’ so I’d just put it to the side and never work on it,” Shoare says. “But because I don’t have a lot of time to write something new, it’s kind of like, I wrote that, whatever, we’ll go with it, delve into it and make it a little bit better.”

That said, neither wants to repeat the project soon, or at least until they don’t have classes, employers and boatloads of other things they have to squeeze around producing art that they love.

“I don’t think I’d ever want to replicate this,” Link says. “But I would definitely like to explore collaboration more. I’ve always thought photography was a medium which was pretty solitary, but I love what can come out it when ideas meld. It’s a great way to look at your art/work/self in a new light.”