Inktober Part 1

Hey Everyone!

October has been a crazy busy month, so my apologies for the lack of blog posts. I decided to take on the Inktober challenge this year on top of my regular schedule for my Canada 150 series, Colored Pencil Magazine article and some commission work as well. (As I’m writing this I’m now questioning my sanity on taking on that much, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

If you haven’t heard of Inktober before it was created by artist Jake Parker in 2009 as a way to improve his drawing and inking skills. It’s now become an annual challenge in October that artists take part in internationally. A prompt list of words is given for each day of the month and the task is to draw your interpretation of the word and post it online with the relevant hashtags.

Rather than bombarding you with all the drawings at once, I thought I would share the first half of the drawings and the rest in a part 2 post at the end of the month.

I’ve done daily drawing challenges before which requires a lot of thought and planning.  This time I decided pretty last minute that I would do this as a way of creating a consistent amount of work while I worked on projects that I couldn’t post publically.

One of the things I discovered about myself was that I like to do mostly completed and detailed drawings. The concept of  “sketching” is sometimes a hard one for me, in the sense of doing something that is looser or not fully rendered. The biggest challenge so far for me has been trying to stick to that and complete a drawing within 1-3 hours max.

Day 1 started off great and then I felt like maybe I wasn’t putting in enough effort. Days 2, 3 and 4 I think I was putting in too much effort in the sense that they were taking me longer to do than the time I had budgeted to do them. Needless to say, I had to reign myself in a little.

I feel like this series of drawings shows my clear struggle between simplicity and detail…
One of the things that’s been really valuable for me in exploring this challenge is using different sizes of ink pens to complete these drawings. It’s also been a great creative exercise finding ways to interpret the words. It’s something I definitely will do on my own going forward but without the pressure of having to complete one a day.

That’s it for Part 1! Stay tuned for Part 2 posting at the end of the month. In the meantime, you can follow the rest of my challenge posts on Instagram.

Thinking of doing your own 30 Day challenge?
Check out my blog post on what you need to know to set up your own!