One Week, One Hundred People 2021

 The One Week One Hundred Challenge was created by artists Liz Steel and Marc Taro Holmes. The name is self-explanatory: the goal is to draw 100 people in a span of five days. I did it for the first time last year. At the time, the pandemic was looming; I did the challenge a week before New York locked down. Looking back at it now, what I'm struck by is that I mostly drew faces. Almost no one was wearing a face mask. This year, I drew hardly any unmasked faces, except for my family at home.

Some people did this challenge using photos or video images, but I always want to do it all from life. I've been trying to level up my figure drawing, and this is a great way to motivate yourself to do very fast observation and really practice gesture drawing without getting bogged down in details or rendering.

One Week 100 People

Last week, I participated in the One Week 100 People challenge. It's a challenge created by urban sketchers Liz Steel and Marc Taro Holmes, and it's exactly what it sounds like. To set a goal of drawing 100 people over a period of five days. People did it however they wanted, in whatever medium they wanted, some working off photographs or television. I decided they would all be done from life, using the same pen (a Sharpie fine marker) in a 5.5 X 8.5 Canson sketchbook I had around.

I wound up with a total of 103. They are all very fast sketches, a few minutes at most, mostly done on the subway or around the museum. The challenge occurred the week before Coronavirus shut down the city. I wonder how many of this 103 will make it through the coming weeks unscathed.