Page of Portraits
Day Seventy-Four of Sketching People
Day 74 of my #Kick365 sketching challenge to draw people in ink and watercolour. A page of random portraits for skin tone practice, and a continuous line crowd scene.
One Week 100 People 2026
Today is the first day of the One Week 100 People challenge. I’m combining that challenge into my 365 days of sketching people challenge, but I’m still aiming to sketch 100 people within the next five days. Theoretically, it’s 20 people per day, so I’m a little short on my daily goal, but I know I’m going to be able to make that up tomorrow. This is the fourth year of doing this challenge, and I was planning on thinking of a theme or technique to tie all my sketches together, but here we are on day one, and I’ve done two completely different sketch pages. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.
Continuous Line Crowd Scene from Photo
After yesterday’s airport crowd scene, I felt inspired to do another one. Today I chose a line of people queuing up to get cash out of the hole-in-the-wall. I started with a pencil line of the top of the heads and shoulders to get everyone positioned according to the photo, and then I switched to ink to add in the individual details.
This way of continuous line sketching is really great practice for looking at the relationship between where the bodies intersect, and the negative space between them. When you draw them as one big shape, you don’t get hung up on trying the sketch people, you’re just drawing a shape, and lines that have relationships with other lines. I’m feeling like I want to do more of these group scenes with continuous lines, but sketch them from life rather than photos.
Page of Portraits from Photos
These portraits are numbered in the order that I did them. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with this page, but I just fancied practicing some skin tone variances. So I looked for portraits to sketch and I let the page grow organically. It’s odd to think that 6 months ago I was annoyed about not being able to sketch noses, but now I feel a lot more confident in drawing and painting them.
