Apple-Pine: oneweek100people

This year I took part in #OneWeek100People2026 - this is a challenge organized by @lizsteelart and @m.holmes.art - they run it every year - sometimes via facebook, sometimes on instagram - but the idea is to give your people sketching muscles a workout for a week. I encourage you to check out a blog post from Liz as this year she drew 100 people twice and got interviewed about the project by Guardian - here is a link to the article!

I love drawing people from life and really enjoyed making this challenge all about my neighborhood in 2025. But my schedule this time around did not allow for so many real-life opportunities - only sketches in the first image were drawn from life:

To get to a 100 I drew from youtube videos - researching movements of tennis players and archers:

And I drew with the wonderful online portrait party drawing group: pencils4tea

And then I joined a super fun 40 min drawing session that Suhita Shirodkar ran this year - her guest artist was a wonderful artist from New Zealand: Andrew James, and we drew musicians:

And on Thursday I was a guest artist at Suhita's substack gathering and we drew from the photos of Ukrainian photographer Alexandra Bolotina. She was a travel and portrait photographer before the full-scale invasion of russian army into Ukraine in 2022 and today her work is spread to photography, organizing creation of adaptive clothing for people who suffered injuries in the war and support children with disabilities. She lives and works in Kharkiv, Ukraine. You can support her work via PayPal donation - send me a note and I will connect you.

Here is a link to a video recording of our session with Suhita Shirodkar where you can see original photos and process of how these quick portraits were created.

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

Having a very simple set of tools in my shoulder bag (see below) ready to go
Scheduling time (mostly at the end of my lunch hour) throughout the week to do this.
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.