I completed the one sketch a day
challenge last Monday, 25th 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 16th 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 4th
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.
