About One Week 100 People
If you haven’t participated before, or if this sketch challenge is new to you, here’s a little bit of background.
#OneWeek100People is a free annual event launched by Marc Taro Holmes, and his urban sketching buddy Liz Steel in 2017. Each year they invite sketchers from all around the globe to sketch 100 people in 5 days.
As much as possible, I like to sketch people from life during this event, but you can sketch from life, from photos, from TV, or even your imagination. The goal is just to spend the five days getting some people sketching practice under your belt.
You have one week to sketch 100 people – can you do it?
I don’t know what happened, but last year’s One Week 100 People sketch challenge didn’t make it onto my radar. I must have been traveling or knee-deep in house renovations and missed it entirely. But not this year.
I’m not sure if I’m going to incorporate a style-theme or limit my art materials in the 2026 challenge, but I’m definitely taking part. I’m not sure I want every set of sketches to have to be in the same style, but I do like the look of ink and tonal shading sketches with splashes of a spot colour to accentuate the focal point, and I definitely want to experiment with using more negative space than I’m used to using.
At the moment I’m also working my way through a 365 day challenge of sketching people in ink and watercolour, and I’m sketching almost every day, and mostly sketching from life. I was going to combine both of these challenges and get my people sketches to count towards both, but I think I’m going to keep them separate.
These bright colours I’m using at the moment are a welcome relief from the drab reality of a vast majority of today’s favoured clothing which seem to be monochromatic variations of black and brown.
Looking Back at my Previous attempts at the 100 People Challenge
One Week 100 People 2024
The last time I took part in the 100 people challenge was in 2024, and I used that opportunity to develop a style of using Tombow pens for shading instead of watercolour.
Tombow brush pens seem to have a more muted or desaturated feel to the colours, even the vibrant shades I favour. But over this past year I’ve fallen in love with the more vibrant results of my watercolours – especially cobalt turquoise lights, opera pink, and my own mix of lime green (cobalt turquoise light + hansa yellow light).
I had a look at my sketches from the 2022 and 2023 100 people challenges, and it seems this love of bright colours has been lingering with me for a while.
One Week 100 People 2023
In 2023 I didn’t make it through all of the challenge, but I did manage to spread some joy with more pink, lime green, and baby blue.
One Week 100 People 2022
In 2022 I used quite a lot of bright primary colours, but the use of pinks and lime greens was still made an appearance.
Sketching Groups with Continuous Line
I’m going to be doing some traveling during this sketch challenge, and it’ll include some time at an airport, which is one of my favourite places to sketch. That’ll give me a good opportunity of getting ahead of the game on sketching at least 20 people per day.
I had a bit of a continuous line warm-up this week (from a photo) of a group of people lining up to board a plane at the airport. It’s a lot easier to sketch a complex group of people if you look at them as one big shape.
Airport Sketch Practice using a Photo
Start by sketching the contour shape with a continuous line, and then go into each figures and add the next level details.
YouTube Video Demo with Suhita Shirodka
Suhita Shirodka just did a demo session where she shared tips for how she completes this sketching challenge, which is one of her favourites. She demonstrated some of her speed-sketch techniques, and sketched from a busy street scene with loads of people in it.
This will be my first year joining this challenge. Thanks for sharing your people sketches from other years, it is so amazing to see the progression. There is hope for my people sketching skills yet!