One Week 100 People 2025

This week I took part in #oneweek100people challenge hosted by @lizsteelart and @m.holmes.art - they run this challenge every year - sometimes via facebook, sometimes on instagram - but the idea is to give your people sketching muscles a workout for a week. I tried to take part in this challenge in 2020 - here is a post that details how I prepared (the world closed up by the end of that week - not many people drawing happened for a long while after). Then I did a fun one in 2021. In 2022 and 2023 I skipped these as the war in Ukraine consumed all the spare resources. But 2024 this was one challenge that I went back to and actually completed.  

For 2025 I decided to make it about my community and sketch on location. During the week of March 3rd I walked, biked and drove around my neighborhood to capture people as they were going about their week. 

What helped me was 

1. Having a very simple set of tools in my shoulder bag (see below) ready to go
2. Scheduling time (mostly at the end of my lunch hour) throughout the week to do this.
3. Having a list of potential places to go ready (so that if there is no energy to make a choice - I have a good default - see below).

Here are my 100 people: kids at school, people in the park, at stores, in the old folks home and in the library and at the protest. 

I've got a people-sketching bug!

The #oneweek100people challenge which I participated in in March did what I wanted it to do: it gave me a bug to find opportunities to sketch people more often. Apart from the occasional everyday sketching, I am now trying to do some online events - and pencils4tea is the one I am enjoying the most at the moment: all poses are timed with interesting music, a lovely bunch of people, and a convenient time. 

Beware -  if you come to draw you might end up being drawn by a bunch of artists! Which is fun too (I ended up drawing myself blindly when it was my turn to pose :)

I will show you what I do with all of these stacks of paper soon :) 

One Week 100 People: 2024

This challenge (#oneweek100people) was organized and curated this year (again) by Liz Steel and Marc Taro Holmes. The idea is to give your people-sketching skills a little boost. There are no rules apart from what is in the name of this challenge. I did not set any specific rules for myself except to try and sketch people every day during the week and see how many I would end up with - no pressure to get to the number was my thing.

After I started with some passers-by whom I saw in the window on Monday I realized that I lived in the wrong place to find so many subjects and quickly devised a plan: I scanned my weekly plan for things that I planned to do anyway but which had a potential of seeing people and introduced a little extra time to those activities for sketching. Some of it was in person, some or online, some involved attending a lecture, some watching a sport. And I also looked into my options for aligning this with an idea of finding like-minded people - this is how I ended up joining pencils4tea on Thursday and Suhita's substack group on Friday. 

you can see all the results below - however number I got to I am happy to count this as a successful challenge - I drew more people, made a bunch of mistakes and tried to correct some and had fun along the way :) 

One Week 100 People: 2021

This challenge was organized and curated this year (again) by Liz Steel and Marc Taro Holmes. The idea of this little race is to give your people-sketching skills a boost. 

I think about it as an opportunity to remind myself how much I enjoy sketching people - even when they are not too excited about it :) 

Most of the people I interact with these days I see on the video calls - so I've done some of those:

 

And I did most of my work from the crazy-wonderful collages of Pelle Cass - trying to follow the story that he is weaving through the mash-up of these sporting events. I had a timer every time and did my best to look at the image more than at the paper. I tried find some rhythm in the way I re-shuffled figures for my collage, looking for simplified bodies.

I also found some people to draw from real life:

All in all - I did more than a hundred but I hope to work completely from life next year. Goes without saying that I miss the days when going to a cafe or library or standing on a street and sketching was easy and simple and something I would do in between other things.