My 365 day One Sketch A Day Challenge

I completed the one sketch a day challenge last Monday, 25^th March 2019, with the little doodle of Morocco Mole. I was tempted to post it straight away, and then launch into some reflections on my year of sketches. In hindsight I’m glad that I’ve waited well over a week to try to put my thoughts on this into some sort of order. In no particular order , here they are:-

It was easier than I ever expected, and harder than I ever expected. Alright, I’ll try to explain that. It was easier than I expected as I had thought that there would come a time when, however much I wanted to produce a sketch, there just would not be any opportunity during the day. That turned out to be nonsense. I could always find time. There was never a day when I could say that I had not found even ten minutes I could steal to make a quick stick man sketch, for example. In fact I never resorted once to such underhand tactics which would fulfil the letter of the challenge, but certainly not the spirit.

No, how I found it harder than expected was that I never expected to lose my oomph, my motivation for the challenge, which I did in September, around about the time I was approaching the six month mark. While I never came that close to deliberately chucking it in, I did come close on more than one occasion to ‘accidentally’ neglecting to make that day’s sketch. I think it helped that I had the blog to post my sketches on. I admitted to myself when I started that there would come days when I couldn’t post a sketch on the same day that I made it, but as long as I posted it when I could and marked clearly which day it had been made, that would be okay.

Now, I’ve never had anyone comment on the blog, and for all I know nobody else has ever looked at any of these posts, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact that I would be advertising my failure to the whole world potentially helped me make sure that the imagined failure didn’t become a reality.

This was never part of my sketchy rules for the challenge, but I did originally envisage these sketches as being something of a chronicle of my year. This is why for the early sketches you see mundane subjects like my Surface Pro charger, my school shoes, my cat etc rubbing shoulders with a sketch from a day out in Gower heritage centre. That tended to go by the by, though after a while. On April 16^th my friend who ran a wedding stationery business asked me to sketch a beautiful ruined abbey in France which was hosting a client’s wedding, and so that painstaking piece of work became my sketch for the day. After that all sorts of subjects started creeping in, like a Komodo dragon, and a London Underground train from the District Line in the 1970s – things which being realistic I was going to need to use some photographic references for.

My search for inspiration along the way was helped by several things. Along the way I undertook a couple of challenges within a challenge. In the month of June I undertook the 30x30 Direct Watercolour Challenge, which meant making at least 30 sketches during the month of June, where I painted the design directly onto the paper, with no sketching in pencil or any other medium beforehand. This had the effect of focussing the mind on a) what I’d like to paint, and b) what I could paint. When it comes to sketching with an ink pen I arrogantly assume that I’m capable of sketching anything that I can see, but it’s not so with paint. Then, just as I was starting to come out of my 6 month malaise, Inktober came along. Inktober helpfully gives you a prompt for each day, although I had to ignore these on the last couple of days of the month since I was sketching in Amsterdam.Speaking of which, I made sketches a day in no fewer than 5 countries during the year – UK of course, Lithuania, Spain, Netherlands and Sweden. These trips were a godsend, and in all honesty the only problem they gave you was which sketch to use as the sketch of the day. I also helped myself back in my September malaise by setting myself the target of producing a range of sketches based on the UK’s tram systems and light rail and metro systems, for a calendar for myself.

Then, in November, I decided to sketch Christmas cards for my work colleagues as I’d done in 2017, and producing these took me nicely through November into December. The biggest help of all, though, was finding the Facebook group Sketching Every Day. Now, just from the name of the group you can see how well that ties in with my challenge. The group provides you with prompts every day of the month. Of course you don’t have to follow the prompt, but when you’re short of ideas or inspiration they’re an absolute godsend. Each month is a range of suggestions, photo prompts, featured artists, and unusual challenges like continuous line drawings for example. I joined in August, and no fewer than 124 of these sketches were direct or indirect responses to the prompts on the group page.

What effect has it had on my sketches/ my pictures/ my abilities? Good question, and not an easy one for me to answer. Dismiss this as smugness sand arrogance if you wish, but with an ink sketching pen in my hand I always feel confident I can produce a decent rendition of my subject, but then I always felt that before I embarked on the challenge anyway. I find that I can sketch some subjects more quickly than I used to be able to sketch, but now actually take a great deal longer to produce others. I have produced some far better ink and wash pictures than I’ve ever managed before, and that’s something which made the challenge worth doing if for no other reason. It’s probably easier for me to say what I’ve got out of the challenge. I would be lying if I said that I don’t have a huge feeling of satisfaction having completed it. During the challenge I have stretched myself and gone beyond my comfort zone, and produced a few fully fledged pictures that I’m actually pretty proud of. So now I will actually tell you which ones I think are good. 

My favourite sketches and pictures from my one sketch a day challenge, in chronological order: -

28/3 – Hero the Cat

2/4 – Mortal Coil

5/4/18 – Newport Chartist Commemorative sculpture

13/4/18 – Laisves Aleja

29/4/18 – AEC Regent Bus

30/4/18 – Crocodile

14/5/18 – Ant

21/5/18 – Northfields Odeon

8/6/18 – Tom Baker – the 4^th Doctor

12/6/18 – Landseer Lion

13/6/18 – Triceratops skeleton

14/6/18 – Mumbles tram

18/6/18 – Sailing Ship

30/6/18 – B Type Bus

1/7/18 – Here’s Johnny

3/7/18 – Laurel and Hardy in blue

29/7/18 – Jimi Hendrix

23/8/18 – Construction worker on Empire State Building

15/9/18 – Manchester Tram

20 – 27/9/18 – A series of modern trams and metros

1/10/18 – Scorpion “Poisonous” (inktober)

2/10/18 – Sleeping Puppy (tranquil – inktober)

4/10/18 – Saruman (spell – Inktober)

7/10/18 – Sleeping Lioness (exhausted inktober)

19/10/18 – Doctor Who monster – (scorched – inktober)

21/10/18 – Old Waterloo and City line train  (drain – inktober)

26/10/18 – Brooklyn Bridge (stretch – inktober)

31/10/18 – Amsterdam canal bridge

9/11/18 – Indian Elephant

12/11/18 – Old London tram

2/12/18 – The Little Tramp

8/12/18 – Pet Jabberwocky

28/12/18 – Swansea Marina

31/12/18 – Porthcawl

4/1/19 – Eltz Castle

10/1/19 – Tower Bridge

11/1/19 Budapest Tram

14/1/19 – Amsterdam Tram

19/1/19 – Murcia Cathedra;

22/1/19 – Rhinoceros

25/1/19 – Tintern Abbey

26/1/19 – York Minster

4/2/19 – Iron Bridge

17/2/19 – Alphonse Mucha

18/2/19 – Clement Attlee

20/2/19  - Fleet Street in the 30s

26/2/19 – The Vasa

3/3/19 – Marine Iguana

19/3/19 – Howling Wolf 

Hmm – 56/365 – doesn’t seem like a huge number, does it? Well, I’m not saying that I think that the rest of them are all rubbish. In the interests of fairness, I shall list what I consider to be the worst sketches now:- 

6/4/18 – In the barbers

20/4/18 – Seagulls

26/4/18 – Three Witches

7/5/18 – Cardiff Pierhead Building

19/5/18 – Horsey

5/6/18 – Meridian Tower Swansea Bay

5/7/18 – Little Owl

11/7/18 – George Michael

17/7/18 – Geoffrey Chaucer

28/7/18 – Ferris Wheel

9/9/18 – Booth’s Hay on Wye

3/10/18 – Inktober roasting

13/10/18 – Inktober Guarded

17/10/18 – Telosian from Star Trek (inktober – swollen)

5/11/18 – Guy Fawkes

7/11/18 – Pineapple

30/11/18 – Macau Skyline

1/1/19 – Fernando Botero

3/1/19 – The Secret Life of Butterflies Zine

29/1/19 – Carry Akroyd

6/2/18 – Bucket List Destination

10/2/19 – Umbrellas

Well, it’s a relief that I only think 22 of them are bad enough to make this list. Of these 22, 11 are either made with biro or with watercolour. If the glass is half full, I’ll say that this shows how successful my ink sketches were – the vast majority of the 365 were pure ink sketches. If the glass is half empty I’ll say that it shows how weak my work with watercolour and biro is.