The past couple years, I’ve done the Inktober art challenge. The first time I tried it was in 2016. Legitimately, my art practice was kind of non-existant in the fall and so it was a good motivator. It’s fun to think about how much life changes from one autumn to the next.

I never got around to making a blog post dedicated to what I did, so I’m going to make on this year as I decided not to do the challenge. Usually, when artists do Inktober, it’s to be more productive and create art daily. For me, that’s less of a problem…I feel like I make enough art now. So my other motivator was to play with inks, but I’ve been using oils more this year than usual and want to stick to working on my series. It was definitely fulfilling to see that I can indeed organize myself and get pretty far, especially if some ink drawings were taking most of the afternoon to pull off and I didn’t always feel on top of the world like it’s common not to during the change of seasons.

One issue I’ve had with the art challenge was the prompts. The first year, I didn’t use any prompts. The second year, I used the official prompts and found them somewhat repetitive. If I were to do a challenge such as creating for 30 consecutive days again, I would probably plan exactly what I’m going to do. One of my ideas was to do figure drawing, then use the base as a pose to design a character on top of. Another idea is to plan a comic book I can draw in 30 days.

The biggest benefit from the art challenge was forcing an idea to happen. I think I genuinely came up with some unique ideas I would have otherwise not have created at all had I not done the challenge. I would not have experimented with inks and learned new techniques and tricks.

A few of my favourites Inktober sketches:

This pepper you may have seen before. My favourites I scanned immediately. Apparently it makes a great wall tapestry because some people bought one on Society6 (have a look).

Whether others do or do not, I really love this little sketch. The colours, the texture, the simplicity, and the memory it brings back for me. This is one of those I’d love to blow up into a huge print to emphasize all those qualities. I really like that the sketch is essentially one type of line and hand movement, over and over.

I remember this crab well because I never quite played with colour inks before. It feels very fresh and simple, and I like that. There’s different shapes, textures, lines, colour, organic marks.

This one is fun because it’s completely an experiment. I like to put old paint in a sketchbook like this and sometimes draw over it. I haven’t quite found the right medium that sits on acrylic paint, since this didn’t work so well. It was hard to control and cover with.

I was in Nova Scotia, so it seemed appropriate to think about fish. I was reading about halibuts since I remembered they are a type of flat fish, and the whole situation of their existence became somewhat funny.

Here are some of the others from 2016 & 2017. I didn’t upload them all to my website, so I embedded the Instagram posts instead. Did I ever get to 31? No, the best I think I got to is 20. The fatigue really sets in at 21. Everyday has to be a new, unprepared idea, sketched and inked. It ends up taking a few hours in itself. Sometimes, I just really wasn’t in the mood either because the change of seasons would affect me.

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Inktober Sketches 2016

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Inktober Sketches 2017