I’ve done this challenge for the past two years and it’s really inspiring to look back on those sketches and see how my style has developed and grown. The goal is to sketch 100 people within 5 days. It’s a busy month. I’m juggling 15 minutes sketches of buildings for the 100 Day Project, and 365 days of Urban Sketching People, through Kick in the Creatives. Ink and Tombow sketches of people of One Week 100 People art challenge
Getting Inspired by an Idea from the 2022 Event
Back in the 2022 One Week 100 People one of my favourite sketches was coloured using a set of primary colours, and I really liked how cohesive the scene looked when limiting the colours. So I used this approach as inspiration to begin this year’s 100 people sketching event.
Colouring with Tombow Dual Brush Pens
For this year’s challenge, rather than going out to sketch, and coming home to finish with watercolour, I decided to grab a small selection of Tombow dual brush pens and colour my sketches on location. I usually use my selection of grey Tombow’s for adding shadows and shading, so this is the first time I’ve relied on them to add colour to my sketches. I really liked this limited use of colour to create a cohesive set of sketches.
Check out my sketches from this year’s One Week 100 People challenge
Day One: I was at Faro Airport waiting for an inbound flight arrival which was delayed, so I had a couple of hours to focus on drinking coffee and urban sketching.
Day Two: I only managed a single sketch at the Adidas shop because we were running around looking for bathroom tiles.
Day Three: It was another bathroom tile search day, and so I had to make do with sketching from photos at night.
Day Four: I went onto the boardwalk to sketch people as the sun set. Which usually means they’re standing still to take photos, but everyone was walking, and strolling by quite fast. So I went back inside and sketched from photos.
Day Five: Drove up to Setúbal and had a night out exploring the town. Sketched live after one bottle, then two bottles. You can see how loose I’m getting!
Day Six: One Week 100 People is a 5 day challenge, but I felt like I’m missed some sketching time because of travel and shopping. I gave myself and extra morning of sketching some people from Sétubal during breakfast.
I could have kept going with sketching people for this challenge, but decided to take my foot of the gas for this one, and call it quits. I only have 3 or 4 pages left in the horizontal sketchbook I was using for this challenge, so I’ll keep going with sketching people to fill it up.
From Needle Point Fine Liners to Fountain Pen
As some point last year I abandoned my beloved fountain pens and got sidetracked into finding the ideal waterproof needle tip pen. That diversion ended up throttling my sketching style and I ended up losing some looseness. So for this year’s 100 People challenge I dusted off my Twisbi pen (and gave it a good cleaning) before filling it with my R&D black ink. It felt really comfortable to get back to my fountain pen, and I’m wondering why I lost my way with needle point pens.
