I've been wanting to dedicate more time to Data Art for a long time, but I've been thinking, planning, and preparing for a while without actually doing anything.

It was clear to me that Data Art could be approached from several angles: it could provide more creative practice for data-minded people, while also offering insight into working with data and tools for those in the art world. And pondering about these two opposing camps with different motives and skills kept me going in circles.

And one day, simply inspired by an article about the Data Garden community - where women learn to program with a focus on creating simple data art - I just posted in my channel and invited people to come together and start creating something based on data.

One of the training projects I decided to start with was creating a portrait of this small community - so-called data badges. They are quite popular in the data visualization field, often made at conferences, data visualization events, or communities.

(Sketch by Sofia Shandibina)

I wrote and drew simple lessons and tips to start diving into the data art with recommendations, showed examples and suggested trying different options. I started sketching to show how to get started - I talked about the features of sketching, recommended drawing quickly and roughly so as not to dive into the details!

Gradually, we began to communicate, exchange ideas and support each other, and also created several versions of data art portraits of the community based on the data collected in the survey!