Ahhh, Inktober. I both love it and hate it. I love that it gets me into my sketchbook everyday (at least for awhile). I hate the self-imposed pressure to make those daily sketches fit for human eyes.
If you’re not familiar with Inktober, here’s a quick rundown, according to the official site:
“Inktober is a month long art challenge created by artist Jake Parker that is focused on improving skill and developing positive drawing habits. Every day for the month of October anyone participating in the Inktober challenge creates an ink drawing and posts it online.”
The challenge has unfortunately been tainted in recent years by controversy surrounding its creator, which has led many to boycott the challenge. Despite that, I’ve found participating to be a great way to discover and connect with other artists, and to spend time with traditional mediums that I’ve been neglecting lately.
Each year an official prompt list is released (although there’s a ton of alternative lists, too), and while I usually struggle a bit to come up with ideas for them, this year’s list came together pretty easily! My main problem is that I try too hard to make each sketch look “finished” and spend waaaaayyy too much time on them, so not a lot else got done this month!
Here’s my month of drawings:
I’m definitely not an Inktober purist, so I used a mix of ink and pencil for these. I really enjoyed seeing the huge variety of approaches different artists took for each of the prompts, and was inspired daily by all that creativity. The hardest part was probably not falling prey to the comparison monster, and reminding myself that it’s a challenge, not a competition.
So have you ever done an art challenge? What was your experience like? I’d love to hear about it!