Doig started working on the portfolio project 100 Years Ago in September 2000 - at the same time he was preparing for a solo painting exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery in the spring of 2002, which bore the same title.  The corresponding titles points to the strong formal and iconographic connections which exist between his prints and paintings.  This print portfolio was completed in May 2001, almost a year before the painting show opened in April 2002.

Compared with his earlier print endeavors, the etchings in 100 Years Ago are much larger and use a technique Doig had never worked with before:  photo-etching.  The technical difference is important to the understanding of the project.  Most of the images in the portfolio are based on photographs transferred on to the copper printing plates through a light sensitive process.  Doig started with a photo-etching plate, which he directly overworked with burnishing, scratching and spit-bite.  Additional plates, up to four in each print, were used where Doig could add layers with more painterly etching marks.  He was playing with the etching media, going backwards and forwards like a D.J., who samples different beats and rhythms and lays them over and existing melody.  For some of the prints Doig photocopied crude photo material and enlarged it. 

Doig's images are always based on photographs that he has either found or taken himself and in most cases, these images refer back to the artist's memory.  The photos are the starting point but it is in the act of making and reworking the plates that the artist's creation unfolds.  He stresses that he never wants to be too precise about a memory.