Well, the OneWeek100People challenge is over for another year – and what a great week it was!

I did two rounds of 100 and was interviewed for a newspaper article.

Some years I don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to the challenge (so I know what it’s like to approach the 100 goal in a minimal way) but this time I was able to ignore most of my work and sketch a lot! 

I was contacted by The Guardian Newspaper on Monday morning about writing an article on the challenge and this meant that I did more sketching than usual early in the week so I could send them the finished image on Thursday.

Read article here

I hit 100 at 3:30pm on Wednesday but had to keep sketching faces until the next morning when I hit 120 and finished the 5 double page spreads in my book.

I did a combination of sketching from photos and sketching on location. I think this approach works really well for this challenge.

Most of the on-location faces were done at Goodfields Eatery in Lindfield and a Westfield Foodcourt. It was wonderful to go back to Goodfields -over the years the interactions with the owners, staff and other patrons in this cafe were always a highlight of this challenge. I realised this year that I was missing this aspect.

I was really happy with the combo of water-soluble pencil (Inktense) and marker (Tombow) and my colour scheme which was randomly chosen while I was doing the first few faces on Monday. I used similar tools  in 2025 but it was good to expand my limited colour palette.

Last year I used a grid as well (fitting all 100 people into the one double-page spread) but this time I increased the size and changed the shape to square.  This square format gave me more options for placing the head and I loved varying the position of the shoulder lines. I would prefer to work a little larger (it would make doing the features easier) but that would then result in more time needed for each sketch!

Each square was 5x5cm and I took 3-4 minutes per sketch with a little touch-up time on completion of each spread.

Round Two

I had completed my 120 faces by 9am on Thursday morning and then during a scheduled call with Uma Kelkar I started Round 2!

I wanted the second 100 to be looser and include more than just the head. So sketching crowds in India from paused videos was perfect. I didn’t have a plan when we started but after the first few sketches I soon got into a rhythm of randomly alternating between Inktense, Tombow and Fude lines.

I’m really happy with this second round of sketches – I got to 63 in an hour with Uma and then reached 100 on Friday after a second session. Note: I was a bit too generous with how I counted people in round 2 🙂

Overall thoughts

I love this challenge so much! It’s intensive but lots of fun and there is certainly something special in the crazy goal of 100!

The result of this year’s  challenge is that I have a list of aspects of people sketching that I want to work on in the coming months. It’s one thing to do this type of shape based sketches based on paused video, but it’s another thing entirely to sketch moving people. 

A huge thanks!

If you did OneWeek100People I hope that you enjoyed it! Hitting 100 is not important – the goal of the challenge is simply to sketch more than you normally would.

Thanks to everyone who has been part of this special week – there has been a lot of activity on Instagram! I’ve loved seeing everyone’s work both there and inside my Sketching Adventure Community on Patreon.

And as always huge thanks to Marc Taro Holmes – the creator of this challenge. It makes me so happy to co-host this challenge with you!