Day 1: 24 completed!

I haven’t been sketching people much lately and  as I didn’t get a chance beforehand to warm-up and work out my tools I decided to start this year’s challenge at home working from photos. I intend to sketch on location this week, but I just wanted to start easily. Plus it was a wet day here in Sydney so a good day to stay home. 😉

Over the years I’ve amassed a large collection of photos (I take screenshots when I’m watching YouTube videos) and so I have plenty of reference photos handy. Sketching from photos is certainly not nearly as much fun as sketching in person but it is a good way to work out my approach and technique.

I enjoyed filling a grid so much last year that I’m using that again. But instead of fitting all 100 on a single double-pages spread, I’m working larger and will need 4-5 spreads to hit 100. I’m also using a square grid so that I have a little more space to position the head.

As for materials, I’m sticking with a limited selection of water-soluble pencils and markers(Tombow). Last year I used Albrecht Durer watercolour pencil but today I used Inktense. I found them harder to use but I know that as I become more confident sketching people this week I will adjust to the more intense colour.

As always there is something very special about this challenge and after doing 24 faces in 2 x 45 minute sessions I’m already feeling the benefit! My marks became more confident after the first 10 faces (I was working from right to left) and I got into a rhythm mixing the pencil and markers.  This mixed media approach of mine does take more time than simply doing line drawing as I’m using multiple pencils and markers in every sketch but I like the flexibility of this approach.

I hope you have a good Day 1 of the #oneweek100people2026 challenge!