Inktober Adventure

For the first time this October, I joined many other artists participating in the Inktober challenge. For those of you unfamiliar with Inktober, Jake Parker, the brain behind the activity, explains it briefly here,

“Every October, artists all over the world take on the Inktober drawing challenge by doing one ink drawing a day the entire month. I created Inktober in 2009 as a challenge to improve my inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It has since grown into a worldwide endeavor with thousands of artists taking on the challenge every year.”

The Inktober website provides a yearly list of 31 word prompts to base a sketch on, one for each day of the month.  You post your result daily on Instagram with the Inktober hashtag.

The movement has grown and now there is an assortment of lists with daily prompts produced by different groups. I couldn’t relate to many of the word choices on the newer lists, so stuck with the original which had words such as ring, mindless, bait, freeze, build and husky. I succeeded in producing and posting 14 out of 31!

I began the process with a mild enthusiasm and took the opportunity to use my collection of pens; fountain, micron, bamboo, as well as different dip pen nibs and inks. The exercise justified the need to purchase more.

One of my challenges is to actually get in my studio. There are chores, people, opportunities, events, etc. to attend to. So many distractions!  Finding a balance is tricky. Taking part in Inktober forced me to pay attention to producing and posting daily. Although I’m working towards scheduled social media posts, I’m not there yet. There’s been a definite dwindle in posts since Inktober is over.

I soon discovered what I didn’t like about Inktober were the prompts. Although it’s not required anywhere in the original Inktober rules that you follow the prompts and it’s definitely not the purpose of the endeavour, most participants do. The official rules say make a drawing in ink, post it online and make something beautiful. To someone raised in the performance based thinking of the retro years, that last bit was a pressure.

I found that I spent a lot of time thinking of a picture to fit with a word or concept and missed a lot of opportunities to do what I usually do, observe my surroundings and the weather, notice sounds, aromas, colors, shapes and light. I kept thinking I had to stop that to produce my post for the day.

I found I was looking for content, for “things” to draw and it seemed as if my left brain was trying to budge into my right brain, censoring and correcting what my hands and eyes were doing, with comments such as, “Well that doesn’t really express the word, does it?”

To be honest, I often stuck to sketching what ever inspired me and then checking the list to see if there was a word that fit the drawing. It was definitely a stretching process and I did learn more about having fun with exploring and playing with an idea, in contrast to exploring and playing with what I’m observing. 

I had to fight the urge to produce something remarkable, to draw first with pencil, which I rarely do, and to rework bits of images to get them just right. 

 

If you’re interested in more of my Inktober images, check out my Instagram page here…. 

 

Jake Parker’s Inktober page here if you’d like to learn about Inktober for next year.