Inktober (2017)
What is Inktober?
Started in 2009 by Jake Parker as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits, the basic rules have been to create a piece of art in ink, every day, and share it with people – online or offline. In 2016, Parker begun sharing official prompt lists for people to work with.
Challenge Accepted
When the frustration at not using my ipad as much I thought I should aligned with an increasingly bleak looking work situation, and off the back of a team-initated drawing challenge, Inktober 2017 became the perfect escape. And the perfect excuse.
Instead of going back to my traditional art roots, I wanted to use the challenge to develop something else. A problem that had been sitting gathering dust: the ipad pro and apple pencil. The 31-day challenge would be a great opportunity to push ahead one day at a time with getting more comfortable sitting down with the ipad and smashing something out.
But of course, worth doing, worth overdoing.
Go on, I dare you
I never wrote it down but I remember setting myself a few ground rules for this Inktober challenge.
- 1. Everything had to be done on the ipad with the apple pencil
- 2. You have from 00:00 to 23:59 every day to work on a piece. No more, no less.
- 3. Regardless of how finished or not it is, you have to post your final piece.
01 – Swift
02 – Divided
03 – Poison
04 – Underwater
05 – Long
06 – Sword
07 – Shy
08 – Crooked
09 – Screech
10 – Gigantic
11 – Run
12 – Shattered
13 – Teeming
14 – Fierce
15 – Mysterious
16 – Fat
17 – Graceful
18 – Filthy
19 – Cloud
20 – Deep
21 – Furious
22 – Trail
23 – Juicy
24 – Blind
25 – Ship
26 – Squeak
27 – Climb
28 – Fall
29 – United
30 – Found
31 – Mask
All 31 pieces were made with iOS Sketchbook Pro, and there’s a whole range of styles and pieces that came from the challenge. It’s fun to look back at these retrospectively;
- Pieces such as #5 and #13 being inspired by Stardew Valley (#5 in anticpation before the Switch version had been released, ironically incredibly prophetic given the number of time I spent hunting down hardwood in-game once it came out. And I had managed to play enough of the game that by [Inktober] Day 13, I had an idea of what Amaranth as a grain crop was like.)
- #15’s creature in the dark looking over its shoulder serves as a permanent reminder that The Rasmus’ album Dark Matters was on high rotation during this challenge (“Something in the Dark”, Track 2)
- The teeny tiny Foreign Shrapnel Dragon as he appears in #7 after being spotted by the human owner of his spare coin hoard (mortified, truely), and #21 defending his stash of coinage.
- Several pieces that serve as a reminder of circumstances and current events at the time too (#12, #27 and #29).
Some of these were revisited later, and some were polished into finished pieces:
06 Swords (2017)
Fight Like A Girl (WIP 1, 2018)
Fight Like A Girl (WIP 2, 2019)
Fall (2017)
Falling Leaves (2018)
Deep (2017)
You Only Die Once (2018)
Found (2017)
Hidden Treasures (2018)
In Conclusion:
All in all I achieved what I set out to do with this challenge – 31 days in a row, sit down with the ipad and the apple pencil and make something. Some days were easier than others, it got easier the more I did it, some prompts were easier than others. I might have a great idea one day, and barely execute the prompt the next. And that’s okay! If nothing else, it gave me the starting blocks for several illustrations that I could come back to – and in several cases, did.