March 6 to 10 was when artists around the world buckled down to the #OneWeek100People drawing challenge, introduced by Marc Holmes and Liz Steel on Facebook in 2016, and still going strong. I did my own, beginning on Tuesday, March 7 and finishing all 100 by the morning of Saturday, March 11.
DAY ONE:
There was a snowstorm in Denmark, making it impossible to go out and find people to sketch. I've found it practical to do my drawings surreptitiously on the train on the way to and from work, but it was late and I was certain a trip solely for the purpose of sketching would culminate in being stuck in subzero temperatures at some station halfway between Copenhagen and our suburban town. The husband was travelling, so no hope of rescue in the car. The upshot of this was I stayed home and used a travel photo as reference, this one taken at an intersection in Bucharest in 2012. It's the image at the top of the post. I used a pen and my go-to 24-pan White Nights watercolor set -- cheap but with vibrant colors.
DAY TWO: I'd started a second drawing right after the first, using people from the other half of the photo, applying the same procedure: draw the lines, then color in with watercolor washes. I finished it to my satisfaction the following day, using a different brand of watercolor (Daniel Smith). The result has quite a different look from the first day's.
DAY THREE:
Did nothing but draw the whole day, starting off with another of my travel photos, this one taken at the My Son ruins in Vietnam. Then I headed off to the town library, where I found a seat on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot of a grocery store. It was 4:30 pm, just when people were doing their shopping or getting off the train from Copenhagen (or heading back) so there was plenty of activity. Finally, actual urban sketching of real people in motion. When I got home after an hour, I added some watercolor, and even managed to come up with three more watercolor sketches, no prelim pencil work. Hit 70 on the third day.
DAY FOUR: Did a lot of teaching on Friday the 10th, so I barely had the energy to pick up my pen. I'm an English teacher at a private language school in the heart of Copenhagen, with about half of my students being Danish and the other half foreigners, generally from Europe, Latin America and East Asia. They're adults, all of them, and most need the English for work or to stay afloat in a graduate or postgraduate program.
The school conducts English-language exams, and I serve as a speaking exam supervisor from time to time. One of my duties is taking digital photos of the candidates, who very often are in their mid to late teens. I decided to draw a bunch of Danish young people from the imagination. I started with the girls, and was too tired to do the boy equivalents afterwards.
Some of the character of those hundreds of exam candidates, over several years, has seeped into these faces. I started with tiny pencil marks to designate the placement of the features and head, then did soft watercolor strokes to indicate their bone structure and hair color, and finished by defining their features with brush pens. The names of the girls, incidentally, are typical of Gen Z’ers in the Copenhagen area. They are entirely fictional.
DAY FIVE: It was Saturday, March 11, in Denmark, which is six to nine hours ahead of North America, and I had planned to go to the Statens Museum for Kunst (the National Gallery) to sketch the museumgoers, then meet some friends for lunch. But once again I had no energy to make the 45-minute journey by train, metro and bus. I was scrolling in some desperation through my Facebook feed when I came upon some photographs taken by high school friend Nancy Ugsad just a few hours or so before: of Silliman University early on Saturday morning (the Philippines being seven hours ahead of Denmark), with the varsity athletes practicing their pitches on a playing field, and members of the marching band sitting on the apron of concrete in front of the Luce Auditorium, each in their own world as they practiced on their instruments. I got Nancy's permission to use her photos, took up a Pitt brush pen, and with quick strokes fulfilled the rest of the challenge, filling in the outlines with a neutral tint (well, Daniel Smith's Jane's Gray, which is a mix of Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine Blue). I photographed the pages of my sketchbook, posted it to the #OneWeek100People Facebook group set up by Marc and Liz ... and was done.
OR so I thought. I was loathe to put away my watercolors, etc. Having abandoned it in late 2021, I was in love with small-scale painting once again. So after a bit of schoolwork, I closed the day with this little (A5) portrait of my email friend Dan Keller, from a black and white reference photo taken in the summer of '69. #OneWeek100People plus One.
I consider the portrait of Daniel as the first in a new self-imposed challenge called "1000 People, 1000 moments", and which will be done in watercolor, alone or in combination with drawing media, no deadline, so as not to compete with all the other stuff I long to do.
--- Bing <3
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