Nicola Osborne
NIC’S 20 MINUTE SKETCHES
For my 100 Days project in 2021 I wanted to open up the brief a little, having drawn only hands in 2020 and I also wanted to consider a reasonable period of time to draw, having found myself taking increasingly long over my drawing every day.
So, I settled on the theme of 20 minute sketches, drawing something every day but limiting how long I could spend on each drawing. That meant that some days I might use the last pose of an online life drawing session as my subject, but often I would root around the house looking for an object that was meaningful or interesting to focus on. I've never been hugely good or excited by still life drawing so limiting the time and trying to choose something of meaning or interest was a good motivation to explore perspective and still life in different ways. I worked in whatever medium appealed, although that was often pencil, watercolour or other more portable media as this project gave me a lovely excuse to just have my sketchbook with me out and about, since my open subject meant I could draw wherever I was and, as the world opened up again, some of my drawings were at Fringe shows, on trains, or drawn making our first visits to friends and family for a long time.
At the end of the 2021 project, having found it sometimes challenging to find the right thing to draw, I made myself a set of prompts and drawing ideas and folded them like raffle tickets so that I could grab a quick idea when I needed an excuse to draw for my sanity and focus. I've only used that occasionally, but 100 days of trying to find new subjects every day challenged me to experiment more.
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