oneweek100people…

My friend Charlotte posted a recent link about this ‘challenge’. Essentially, it involved sketching 100 people between Monday-Friday 5-9 March… anything goes: quick scribbles to more detailed drawings; any medium; ideally, drawn ‘out on location’, but copying from postcards/photos is fine too.
So, I decided to give it a go.
From the outset (and given the time constraints, not to mention other stuff I needed to be working on), I knew it meant that my own sketches would be not much more than very rapid caricatures. In fact, I experimented in the Watershed bar one lunchtime and soon realised that my offerings needed to be limited to one-minute sketches (literally).
In order to keep things simple, I gave myself some specific ‘rules’, namely:
1.    7x4.5cm ‘picture frames’ (ten per A4 sketchbook page x 10 pages).
2.    The sketches would be very simple, ink LINE drawings only – no shading or black infilling.
3.    On completion, I would ‘colour’ (with watercolour markers) backgrounds to each sketch (limited to just three colours: red, yellow and blue).
4.    Every sketch I produced would be included in the final 100 images – NO editing or corrections allowed!

Most of the other people participating would no doubt have been entering their respective offerings on Instagram: #OneWeek100People2018 (for some reason, I can no longer update my Instagram account via my laptop… so I abandoned Instagram a few months ago).

For me, I decided that I would simply post a SINGLE image, incorporating all 100 scribbles, on my One Day Like This blog and also this blog.
The resulting sketches were hardly inspiring art(!), but I did enjoy the process AND the challenge. The vast majority of my images were indeed produced ‘on location’… most of them are VERY ordinary, lots are absolute rubbish, but perhaps a handful are quite good (well, I like them anyway). Lots simply look like pretty awful cartoon characters!
For my taste, I ended up concluding that ‘keeping it simple’ was the key.
If I did it again, I’d probably do things very differently… I don’t think the three-colour backgrounds worked very well… and my insistence on drawing ‘frames’ for every image ended up making them look a bit like those old cigarette cards (you’re probably MUCH too young!). Although restricting my sketches to very small frames simplified (and therefore speeded up) the ‘100 people’ challenge, I also think it would have been good to vary the style, size and medium (and not just heads)… Having said that, the use of ‘frames’ (as opposed to lots of random scribbles covering pages of my sketchbook) made it easier to come up with very sparse, graphic images – perhaps I should have concentrating on producing more of these?
Anyway, I’ll be fascinated to see what work other people end up producing.
PS: You'll need to click on the image to enlarge it... but it'll probably be a little blurred!