After 8 months I’m ready to write about Sketch or Die Scandinavia, the beautiful Mexican project that I found by accident on the Internet one night and I had the honor to produce the first international version of it. The project consisted basically in a group of illustrators locking their selves in a room and drawing non-stop under 48hrs what people wished through social media (twitter & facebook).

I didn’t hesitate in sending a mail asking them if I could borrow their idea to produce it in Sweden. After a few emails, El Barbon (one of the creators of this project) and I decided to meet in Barcelona, where he was living at that time. I think in general they were skeptic I mean, why would they borrow their project to a stranger…And to be produced in Sweden!! After having a coffee under Barcelona’s sun we agreed to work together.

We managed to produce Sketch or Die Scandinavia on 5 months through skype meetings and tons of mails. We got into the project great artists: Kristofer Ström (SWE), Basti Santa (SWE), Rickard Grönkvist (SWE), Lina Eriksson (SWE), Stine Hvid (DK) and Jonathan Mthsn (NOR) and around 15 guests.

To produce this project was a whole new experience for me. When you produce an event, you count your success in visitors or comments from the people that visited your concert or exhibition…this time they were not there physically but we were able to interact with them in a whole new way. Its also hard when you are producing someone else’s project, I wanted the Scandinavian version to have “my touch” but still respecting the origins of the project. I loved working with Sketch or Die also because it was a Mexican project. I really wanted to help them to get a kick internationally and increase their chance to spread this project outside Mexico. After producing the Scandinavian version, they’ve been contacted by several people in other countries wanting to produce their own version of Sketch or Die. I would like to produce Sketch or Die Europe in the future, but there has not been more talks regarding this.

Sketch or Die Scandinavia has today:

543 Followers on Twitter

2388 Likes on Facebook

33086 Views on Bambuser

332 Sketches on Flickr

19 Countries sending requests

A few months after the project took place, there was an exhibition with some of the sketches and pieces created under sketch or die. There was also an online auction. All the money raised was donated to “Rädda Barnens krisverksamhet i Malmö”