Drawing Day is an event initiated last year by Mick Gow, creator of the Rate My Drawings site, with the simple intention of drawing attention (if you’ll excuse the expression) to art by encouraging artists worldwide to create 1 million drawings on a single day, and coordinate, cooperate and share the experience through a variety of social networking sites.
Participants can upload and share their drawings, or even draw directly online, through sites like deviantART, YouTube, Red Bubble, Drawspace, Rate My Drawings, Flickr and a number of others. (It’s worth investigating the list of participating sites just to see if some of them are new and of interest to you.)
The ambitious goal of 1 million drawings may or may not be reached, but the event is a fun way to capture a little attention for the act of drawing, and perhaps kindle some contact and community among participants.
The Drawing Day web site gives an overview of the turnout from the first event, and points to some galleries of uploaded drawings from the day, as well as videos of users drawing on YouTube and even virtural drawing in SecondLife.
There is also a blog associated with the event, which covers news about participating sites and, of course, is counting down time to the event.
Drawing Day is the first Saturday of June each year, and this year it’s this Saturday, June 6, 2009.
(Image above, a detail from Rembrandt’s etching Landscape with a Man Sketching a Scene, in which the artist caught a fellow artist sketching the same cottage that was his subject.)
