I’m excited to announce that Marc Taro Holmes and I are hosting the One week 100 People challenge again this year between 9-13 March.

The goal is to sketch as many people as you can in 5 days. It’s a short but intense challenge and one that has done a lot for my confidence to sketch people in public. There is something special about striving for a big goal of 100 people sketches! You can find out more about the challenge in my post from last year or Marc’s info page. 

There is a facebook group – or simply use the hashtag #oneweek100people and #oneweek100people2020 in Instagram

There are a lot of different ways that you can approach this challenge, but this year I want to focus on quality rather than quantity. This challenge is actually about quantity not quality, but I want to up my game! As I’ve always hit the target of 100 people easily (last year it was 150 in the five days and most of those were done in watercolour) this year I want to make sure that I do some serious research and analysis of my work. And in fact, I want to start the research process during February – re-visiting the anatomy of the head and maybe even start studying the torso, arms and hands.

It’s super interesting to re-read my takeaways from last year and no surprise that research was the number one idea. Practice without research can lead to the cementing of bad habits so it’s so important to keep the research up. It’s good to realise that in the last 12 months I’m adding watercolour to most of my people sketches and that I have a wonderful local cafe to go to where I can draw people – the staff at Goodfields are so super supportive and encouraging.

There are many ways to approach this challenge – you can do them all from the comfort of your own home… but it’s definitely more fun to sketch people out on location.

Although it’s not until next month, it’s good to start thinking about what you want to get out of the challenge…

– What aspect of drawing people do you need to work on the most? 
– Can you do some research during Feb to make it easier during the One Week?
– How long do you need to do a people sketch? Do a trial run and think about how you can fit this time into your week.

Of course you don’t have to do any prep for the challenge – just the act of focusing on people sketching for a week has so many benefits in itself. But if you really want to see a big change in your work, the more research and practice you can do the better.

Further reading:

All my previous Oneweek100people articles 
My strategy for drawing people

So will you be joining us? Are you going to do any prep in February?

I would love to hear from you in the comment section below. I know that it’s going to be a lot of fun – as always!