Hey everyone! I expect some of you have been thinking about #30x30DirectWatercolor – and YES! It’s absolutely on for 2025!
This is will be the eighth year and I definitely want to keep it going. I feel, more than ever that the first-hand experience of a thirty-day marathon is valuable. This is the artist’s retreat, the travel workshop, or the mentorship that you’ve always wanted, but it’s free! and full of people who are here for the love of art! What could be better!
The big news this year is: we’re making a long anticipated move to Uma’s new social media site, Vivify.ai.
Some of you might not know, in addition to being an amazing artist and the co-founder of #30×30, Uma is also the founder of a tech platform for artists and art-instructors, Vivify.ai.
Vivify is perfect for our little art project. It allows sharing and commenting of images in a private online space, free of any ads, or algorithms controlling what you see. It’s perfect for the kind of community we are building. Global social networks are not created as tools for you to use. They exist to monopolize our time and our attention. In our Vivify Pod, there’s nothing in the way of the art, and the interaction.
You’ll be able to easily see everyone’s work in one place, and exchange comments and inspiration with everyone doing the marathon – everything we used to do in Facebook – but now it’s Uma’s own creation!
So please head over to the Vivify Pod; #30×30 Direct Watercolor 2025 whenever you have a chance. (A ‘pod’ is what they call a shared space on Vivify:) You can use your existing google profile with ‘one click’, or create a new Vivify account and password. Just hit the yellow button in the lower right corner to get started.
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Of course, I’ll still be blogging here, and we still encourage you to share on your personal socials. None of this is required to do the marathon. But we are very excited about this move to our own little slice of the internet!
Thanks everyone! The painting begins soon!
~Marc
#OneWeek100People, Day 05, 2025
Thanks everyone who participated! I hope y’all had a great time, I hope y’all did some drawings you’re excited about, and I hope you spent some time sketching with friends!
Next year will be the TENTH YEAR of #OneWeek100People! I’m really shocked to think about that :)
I’m going to have to think of something significant to do to mark that milestone.
Sometime before I die; I’m going to do 500 in a week; 100 a day for my self imposed five day week. That’s my crazy promise :) Maybe Year Ten will be the year! Keep in touch and let’s keep inspired for next year :)
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But wait! We’ll see you sooner than that!
Because it’s 30×30 in June! which is coming up sooner than you think! Mark your calendar if you want to run a REAL marathon with me!
Are you ready for One Painting a Day? Thirty Paintings in the Month of June?
I have done a lot of wandering in my time :) because that is how my brain works :) but this year it’s absolutely a watercolor year! I’m excited about some new ideas for watermedia – so we’ll see you then? Hope you’ll join us!
Bonus Day! #OneWeek100People 2025 : Day 04
It’s always great when you finish your 100 and you can goof around for the rest of the marathon :)
I was looking around for fun things to draw, and found this exhibition Dressing up History at the McCord Stewart museum. It’s a collection of historic costumes, made in the late 1800’s, and worn at lavish costume balls held in Montreal.
I couldn’t help but think of Ophelia, looking at the dress laid out on the table.
I suppose this isn’t really ‘people drawing’ – as they’re just garments hanging on frames. A true urban Sketcher wouldn’t be allowed to take liberties with all these headless dressmakers dummies! They believe you must report what you see faithfully. (And I respect them for their dedication! But today I’m just having fun :)
I always find museum lighting so dramatic. Even the museum thinks it’s a little spooky. Every few minutes the lights would go out in the main hall, and they’d play music and project dancing ghosts on the walls.
Both these dresses reminded me of famous headless ladies. Maybe Anne Boleyn, and a girlish Marie Antoinette :)
Just as a side note for the artists out there; these were done on a cheap art-store house-brand sketchbook paper (unlike my real 100, which I did on small offcuts of cotton rag, in an effort to reduce the pile of paper scraps I have in the back room :)
As a result, I had to punch up the faded, washy colors, and tweak the contrast in photoshop – and even go back and do accents in India ink.
Back in the old days, I used to be plagued by watercolors being too pale. This can happen for a lot of reasons. Being too cheap to put out fresh paint each day. Using too much water. But also, it’s just the nature of sketchbook paper.
When cellulose paper has a lot of sizing, the color floats on top, rather than absorbing into the paper. This stops your sketchbook from getting soggy, and cuts down wrinkling (somewhat), but it can cause aggressive bleeding and/or hard edged puddles. Both of which you can see in these sketches today.
Back when I did a lot of sketchbooking, I was tuned up for this kind of sized-cellulose paper. I actually preferred it for many years. Today, I was really struggling! I’ve lost the instinct for it! Though, it’s already coming back. Ophelia was the last sketch of the day, and it mostly came out the way I wanted it.
But I did have three total failures which I had to tear up! I always rip up a truly bad painting :) It’s very gratifying :)
So for what it’s worth – that’s why some people choose a paper, and a brand of paints, and never never change what they use! For sure you should never go back to student grade :)
OneWeek100People, 2025 Day 03
Come on right? The light on that bike rack was like being in a Christopher Nolan movie. I do this marathon every year to remind myself what I love about street sketching.
Keep moving and make your own luck.
Only time and patience will give you the gems.
So ok – I painted this one from a phone snap. (I’m way to honest for my own good! But I have to tell it like it is). Does that put the lie to what I’m saying? If I stood in the snowbank and painted it, would it be any different? It might have been MORE spontaneous :) It’s true. But I feel, in this case, I’m no different from a street photographer – except I develop my pictures in watercolor instead of lightroom.
Less is more! Some of my personal favorites are the simple silhouettes. There’s almost no technique to it. Just let the puddles merge in the shape, and wait just long enough to touch in some shadow.
If you stay with the same pigments year after year you’ll learn how far they float, and when is the right amount of dampness to try charging into a shape.
That one smiling fella was getting some great news on his phone. It’s a lot of fun trying to find good poses when nobody is doing anything. I snapped his pic because he was too good to pass up.
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So I’m not going to show you the rest of the 100; I don’t want to bore you or embarrass myself with the bad ones. Let’s say it was very easy cut it down to the best third. Keep that in mind! if you do 100 drawings, your best 10, or your best 36 in this case, are going to look a LOT better than the whole pile.
It’s good for your morale to tear up half of what you do! When you look back on it later you’re much happier :)
Hope you’ve been doing the marathon too hey? Feel free to drop me a comment with your links! Maybe I’ll see you on Instagram? I’m off Facebook for Lent this year. Please keep using the hashtag so we can find each other!
OneWeek100People, 2025 Day 02
So, last couple Marathon’s I made a big deal about getting 100 in a day. But honestly; I don’t really do ink drawings any more? Like simple pen line, or anything monochromatic. I fished out the dip pens last year because I wanted speed to be the essence.
But the truth is, my line drawing had degenerated into spaghetti – because it only exists as a framework for color shapes.
I just love how you have infinite colors in the tiny paint box.
You know why I started with watercolor? Back in first year of Illustration school, they told us to go buy a set of 100 markers. I took one look at the price (and that was 40 years ago!) and said; no way. I’m not buying all these colors! Especially markers. You don’t click the cap down and five bucks worth of marker dries out in your bag.
How many of you have taken watercolors to figure drawing class? You know those timed poses? 3,5,10 minutes. If you don’t work fast, you won’t get accidental blending. And if you don’t have a time limit (like trying to get 33.3r drawings in one day) then you always slow down. (Because you think it makes your drawings better :)
I used to say ‘work one shape a time, so it stays wet and blends’ – but I think it’s more like 1.5 shapes at a time. Start the next one just a little bit too soon, so you can choose – wet-on-dry, vs, wet-on-damp. A hard edge, vs. a chance to blend.
Who’s your favorite today? I have to like the Urban Cowboy, The nurse who didn’t like me looking at her. Or the subway cop who definitely saw me acting suspicious. There is a whole generation of subway cops in Montreal who grew up playing Assassins’ Creed. They love the tied back hair and Viking beard :)
#OneWeek100People, 2025 Day 01
Hey everybody! It’s March! 2025! I’m somewhat shocked to note this is the 9th year of #OneWeek100People. This means *next* year is kind of a big deal.
There’s very very very few things in life I’ve stuck with for more than ten years – besides drawing.
Every year my drawings get more interesting to me, but harder and harder for me to explain what I’m doing.
“I just paint them?”
So: what can I say about this one?
Color Blocks: Every major shape in the sketch is one color, but all the colors are dirty’ed up with the neighboring colors.
Draw with the Edges: The background shape cuts around the white faces – wet on dry – so they have a razor edge. The colored shape is drawing the head in negative. The weird orange dots in the background are only there so I can get away with flagging his head in bright orange. It makes it look like the orange is on purpose.
Work Fast for Blending: I work fast so that shapes can bleed into each other ( her pant leg for instance ). But I don’t let important edges touch; like between his and her jackets. If that one edge had smudged you lose the overlapping figures.
Reserved Whites: This year was using a nice big brush. I don’t know, like a #10 round? Male Pinky Finger Sized. It’s fun because it’s so fast, it hold so much paint, and you have to make the reserved whites by instinct. I think of the whites as internal edges. The white on his shoulder is a pretty great mark – it shows you what is an upper surface, but it also indicates where his bulky jacket sleeve insets into the shoulder, and it draws the shape of his hood. All the other small whites in his torso are doing similar work, describing folds in the jacket sleeve. Not sure if you can tell; but they’re NOT drawn into the sketch. I outline shadow shapes in the sketch, but I try not to outline highlights anymore. A highlight with a line around it doesn’t work!
We just had a 125 year record snowstorm in Montreal; so this year it’s going to be all metro (subway) drawings. There’s next-to-nobody on the street; nobody is doing any activities outside. You can barely walk on the sidewalks downtown. So this year get ready for a lot of people-on-their-phones :)
By the way – who’s your favorite subway rider today? And why is it that amazing fellow in the fedora and shades. That guy brought the funk!
Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolor : 100th Year Anniversary show : (Without any of my paintings :)
This year is the 100th year for the venerable old CSPWC, which is kind of a big deal. I was excited to apply for the 2025 member’s exhibition, but, unfortunately, I have been soundly rejected!
Naturally that’s not my favorite outcome, but – I’m not too upset either.
I’ve applied 13 times and been accepted nine, so that’s a solid B+ , which is better than I ever did in school.
And! There was a complication this year.
They announced they would hold just TWO spaces, especially reserved for oversize paintings. Which, in this case could be up to 72″ in the longest dimension. Now this is a remarkable opportunity for a watercolor society show. Unheard of really. Typically the largest accepted work is full-sheet, 22×30″, which I imagine is because of available wall space. However the CSPWC has a permanent national gallery which is significantly larger than the rotating venues for most society shows.
And so – even though it meant I would be competing for one of ONLY two possible spaces, I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, so that’s what I did.
If I was going to be rejected, I’d be rejected gloriously!
I settled on a diptych of full-sheets, so two panels, totaling 44×30″. Which is quite a bit shy of 72″ – but is twice as big as the largest thing I’ve previously painted.
(Also, if you were to be accepted, you have to frame and ship these things. So to be honest, this is more manageable.)
To help with going bigger, I switched from a traditional watercolorist’s folding palette, in favor of using Chinese dipping-sauce dishes :) This lets you have more color (bigger puddles), brought right to the spot where you’re working. Very handy for pouring! Plus, I used some hand-mixed pigments for even larger batches of color. Essentially making my own giant 3.5″ pans of watercolor. (Something I tested out during the 2023 30×30 marathon. It’s quite a savings over tube-color if you’re willing to go to the trouble).
The painting is another of my primitive jungle fantasies; art-historically related to Rousseau and (much more problematically), Gauguin. (I am not a fan of his life, but his paintings remain cultural artifacts).
I’ve been doing works with this motif on and off, (here’s one from 2021), which are not just fan art, but rather, part of a personal narrative to do with an imaginary return to a primitive culture.
I have what I feel is a reasonable amount of anxiety about the end of civilization. Climate change, consumption fueled pollution, global war and genocide, the fall of democracy – lots of reasons to be concerned. And so, from time to time, I make an image with a positive spin on the idea of returning to the stone age.
I feel I’m doing a modern version of Rousseau; his imaginary goddesses in his imaginary jungles.
Because hey, If you can’t create a mythic-fantasy as art-therapy – well, what is the point of being an artist?
So, there you have it. The very best reason to paint; knowing you will probably be rejected, but you do it anyway :)
“Après nous,” she said, setting down her glass, “le déluge.”
2025, 44×30″, diptych, watercolor on cotton rag.
#OneWeek100People : Coming March 3, 2025 – Also Big Changes This Year! Please read if you want to play : )
It’s happening again, Monday March 3, 2025 – time again for our annual street-sketching marathon, #OneWeek100People! < See the past years events here! ]
This is, of course, our fun activity where we try to sketch 100 people in a single week. That’s roughly 20 a day if you like to have your weekends free.
I’m a huge fan of Urban Sketching, in which the ‘rules’ are to draw from life. But I’m also allergic to rules in general; so I’m not going to fuss if you use photos, draw from a movie, your own imagination, or whatever it takes to hit 100 people in a week.
The goal is pure self-directed sketching-for-the-love. (Or the training – if you’re out to master the skill as fast as possible.) If you just want to practice anatomy, let’s go for it together. If you want to go experience your city first-hand, let’s get out and sketch in the streets.
Me personally, I’m absolutely going to try again for 100 in a single day. It’s so much fun for me to indulge in some HYPERFOCUS :) I’ve been able to do it in the past, but I want to push myself further. To do more and more sophisticated work in the same intense timeframe. I’m remembering my college days of 30 second and 1 minute gesture drawing. Time to get back to that kind of eye-hand dexterity.
So let’s do it together! Hashtag #OneWeek100People on your socials – post your work! – comment on other people! – let’s have fun motivating each other.
But here is the big change for 2025; We are CLOSING THE FACEBOOK GROUP where we have done a lot of the posting and sharing over the first eight years.
FB and other Socials have been essential in the spread of Urban Sketching as a past-time. They’ve helped me meet artists from all over the globe. Every day it continues to bring me art and entertainment. But I find as I get older, I am less and less able to keep up with the stream of information and still get anything done at the same time.
I love personal challenges like #OneWeek100People for this very reason. They give my attention-deficit brain the structure that I need :)
So I’ve decided to focus on MAKING the art, and to step back from MODERATING the community.
I hope you will all understand!
And please, do feel free to START YOUR OWN GROUPS. I don’t feel we have any sort of ownership over this concept. Please steal this idea! Liz Steel and I launched this together in 2017, simply as an excuse to draw with each other :) Anyone can reach out to their own socials. Tag a sketcher you love online. Build you own communities.
Take care and see you all here, and at the hashtag #OneWeek100People! – Monday March 3, 2025!
International Self Portrait Day is Not Today!
International Self Portrait Day is November 1st. < Not today.
I can’t seem to find who started the ‘official day’, or if it has a home online. I don’t think so? It seems to be just a meme that spread through social media.
But better late than never right? I’ve had these two sketches lying around for a while so I figured I’d scan’em up.
Actually Laurel scanned them for me, so you get to see them :)
I’ve always felt self portraits were a little silly, but as I get older I’m a little less self-conscious about it. There’s certainly more to notice in your own face as it ages. I’m beginning to understand the reason to have a yearly record you can look back on. You can watch yourself age, at the same time as you watch your artwork change. In some senses it’s keeping track of your mortality – but for artists, we usually improve with age :) so I don’t mind that.
This one is a bit of a joke. I honestly don’t know how to take a mirror selfie. I mean; the fact the camera is always in the shot is kind of weird isn’t it? It seems odd that in the millions (billions?) of selfies online we don’t see the constant presence of our phones as invasive.
It turns out the innovation of the smart phone wasn’t the the camera, but rather the idea of the *connected camera*. The ability to instantly share images is certainly a cultural revolution. My life wouldn’t have been the same without it.
So selfies! If you did one this year; why not post it in the comments. Next year we can look back, and see if our artwork is maturing faster than our faces :)
A Sketch for the King
Bantry House, County Cork, Ireland, 15 x 22″ Watercolor on Cotton Rag, Fabriano Artistico.
This painting is a redux, sized up to half-sheet (15×22″) working from my own quarter-sheet sketch (11×15″), made on location in 2016.
It’s to be my submission to the Royal Collection of King Charles III, hopefully to reside in Windsor Castle under the care of the Royal Librarian.
Now, of course, I don’t know if I’ll be accepted by the jury! So wish me luck :)
I know King Charles is a watercolorist himself. I remember a book on his paintings in my college library. I hope he has a special interest in work coming from the (ex)colonies. I sincerely hope Ireland is no longer a sensitive topic. What do I know, I’m just a Canadian kid, and I’m largely (completely) ignorant of the history at hand.
This donation of work marks the 100th year of the Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour. We’ll be adding 25 works to the royal collection, bringing the Canadian component to 100 pieces. We’ve tithed work to the crown twice before, in 2000 and 1985. (Not me personally, the Society). I have no idea if it will happen again in my career, so I really had to make the effort.
It’s not recorded if the King has ever been to Bantry House, though it is of course known to the crown. The original owner, Richard White, was made the Earl of Bantry for his role in repelling an attempted French invasion in 1796. A fact that may or may not be of interest to the judges!
To be honest, I expect they’ll be most interested in presenting an encyclopedic view of Canadian watercolor as it stands in 2024, and to that end I made something that is as much as possible, a personal work. It looks back to when I was at the height of my adventures as a world-travelling painter, but I hope it’s handled with some freedom of expression :)
Well – I hope I haven’t given myself too much freedom :)
Finger’s crossed, and expect an update here!
~marc
Citizen Sketcher 