I did it! I sketched 100 people in one week! I sketched mostly from television, mostly Murdoch Mysteries (costumes are fun to draw!) I used a variety of media and enjoyed the exploration. The first page took me 3 hours to complete, the Pitt Pastel Sanguine page, took 1 hour. The rest fell somewhere in the middle.

100 People One Week — 2025

I did it! I sketched 100 people in one week!

Well — one week spread across a few sessions, with a lot of good television keeping me company. This was my most experimental year yet, and I loved every messy, discovery-filled minute of it.

I sketched mostly from television — mostly Murdoch Mysteries, because the costumes are just so fun to draw — but also The Curse of Oak Island, and a show called Unexplained and Unexplored, which turned out to be surprisingly good drawing material. Lots of interesting faces.

The Materials

This was a mixed media year, and I leaned into that fully. I used more different tools and materials than any previous year, and I learned things along the way.

The anchor of the year was the Derwent Shade and Tone Mixed Media Set — a gorgeous set with a full range of warm and cool tones across Inktense, Graphitint, Tinted Charcoal, and Pastel Shade media. The first page I completed used this set, with the Murdoch Mysteries faces arranged in a light hexagon grid. That page took about three hours. I also did detailed color swatches of the entire set — all twelve colors and media — which became its own little design on the left page.

I also worked with the Derwent Drawing Terracotta 6400 — a rich sanguine drawing pencil — and the Pitt Pastel 1122-138, a sanguine pastel. Both on the same spread, one page each. That spread took one hour. The difference between the two is fascinating — the pencil gives fine detail, the pastel is looser and warmer. Both are entirely in that beautiful terracotta red.

One of my favorite pages featured the Gansai Tambi Granulating Aurora Orange — such a gorgeous paint! I used it for the background wash and the portrait itself. The granulating effect it makes in the skin tones is just beautiful. This is my third self-portrait, and I remain unconvinced it looks much like me, but I love the page.

For the Oak Island pages I switched to the Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Fineliner in Dark Sepia 175 — a lovely warm brown line that suits those weathered, cap-wearing Oak Island faces perfectly. This spread is packed — faces, notes, measurements, show details. It has a wonderful chaotic energy.

I found a new favorite paint on the Thursday pages — Holbein Sepia watercolor, which I tested in a set of swatches alongside more Unexplained and Unexplored pen drawings on the left and Murdoch Mysteries faces in the Shade and Tone set on the right.

The page featuring faces from Unexplained and Unexplored also has a little painted pencil case and color block done in that Aurora Orange — I was clearly smitten with that paint all week. Look at those colors, the oranges and greens, all from one paint!

The final pages brought everything together — portraits 84 through 100, Murdoch Mysteries again, using the Shade and Tone set with a little blue and green watercolor for accent. I also made a useful discovery: Unipin pens bleed with watercolor, but Rapidograph ink does not. Noted for next time!

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Best year yet! And the first time I did all 100 people! I did it! One hundred people. And I already can’t wait to do it again.