It’s easy for each day of the past year to morph into one giant blob of banana bread and boredom.
But a lot more happened than that, even while we were all cooped up indoors.
To help us remember the strangeness of the past year, illustrator Tim King took on an ambitious project: to do a drawing documenting everyday life, every single day of 2020.
The initial plan didn’t have anything to do with coronavirus.
Back in 2014, Tim first challenged himself to draw something every day, hoping it would be a way for him to keep his skills in good shape.
‘But after completing a year, I realised it was much more than a daily drawing project,’ Tim tells Metro.co.uk.
‘When you collect the individual images together you get a fascinating story about how we lived throughout a year.’
So Tim kept up the vow to draw daily, attracting attention for his 2016 doodles. That was the year Donald Trump was elected as US president and the EU referendum took place, so it was a rather eventful twelves months.
At the beginning of 2020, Tim thought he was simply continuing this project.
But a couple of months in, he realised this particular year was going to be… special.
He found that his daily drawings didn’t just document life in lockdown, but helped him to process all the bizarre happenings, too.
‘2020 has been the most interesting and fitting year for this project,’ says Tim.
‘Even though the year contained massive news on a global scale, it was all of the seemingly ‘small’ things about our lives – how we socialise, shop, work, eat – that had the biggest impact on us.
‘Using drawing was a very immediate way to capture these personal changes.
‘Last year it was very easy for people to feel isolated, but but by looking for things to capture, I was noticing all of the relatable experiences we were going through together, and putting the images on my Instagram each day let me have a connection with people going through the same situations.’
It wasn’t all plain-sailing, of course. Like all of us, Tim had some lockdown lows and moments of inspiration blanks.
But this helped to teach him the power of rejection perfection in favour of reality.
‘There are days when it can seem tricky to draw something,’ says Tim. ‘Early on in the project, the idea of coming up with a new scene/idea each day did feel a bit daunting.
‘But then I realised you just have to embrace it – sometimes things not happening is the story (e.g. the morning after a Zoom quiz!), and you have to find an interesting way to show it.
‘Not every drawing has to be visually perfect either – the project would become boring if that was – it’s the changes in scale, detail and energy that add variation to the project and keep it exciting.’
Now, a year on from the arrival of Covid-19 in the UK, Tim has launched a Kickstarter to turn 12 months of daily drawings into a book.
2020: A Drawing A Day will be 392 pages of reportage illustrations in chronological order, so you can flick through the year in print form.
If you’d like to see that book get made, you can help to fund the project through Kickstarter.
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Get in touch by emailing MetroLifestyleTeam@Metro.co.uk.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2021/03/09/illustrator-documents-a-year-of-covid-with-daily-drawings-14214042/
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