My Inktober 2019 Experience

Another year has passed since I finished my first Inktober challenge. Last year October 2018, was the first year I joined the art community to do the Inktober challenge. I previously described in my last year’s post about Inktober. To summarize it, Inktober is an art challenge that is going on around the month of October when people come up with inked drawings based on a theme or usually following a daily prompt list. These lists are usually posted on social media by an artist. Most people follow Jake Parker‘s prompts, because he started this challenge.

I also followed Jake Parker’s prompts. This year’s prompts were challenging and fun. There were some prompts that you had just a few ideas to start about but there were others that you had so many that you didn’t know where to start. For example day 19 was about “Sling” and I almost had no idea what should I draw. Most people drew sling shot but I always try to avoid cliche subjects and go with the third or fourth option. For that day I searched a little on Google and found many images of people slinging off a rope or hoister belts. So I planned to draw someone slinging off a rope and going deep into a dark cave. As I said other artists can make their own prompt lists and their fans can use those prompts in their drawings. There are prompts based on themes, for example plants, Halloween especial and video games. There is even a website for generating Inktober prompts.

There are a few drawings that I really enjoyed making and they are my favourites. These are “ancient”, “dragon”, “freeze”, and “snow”. I like “ancient” because there were a few challenges and I haven’t came across them until I worked on this. I thought I’m not good at perspective drawing but I did well. Drawing this ancient ruin was fun. It was so fun that I had to came back and finish it. Creating this environment was such a hard work and I guess working on that dark cave (sling prompt) was a good practice. My dragon drawing is my favourite because I worked hard on it. I had to do many passes to make different values across my drawing. The dark parts had to stay dark and highlighted areas had to be stay untouched or textured. This dragon is almost taking over a full page of my sketch book and working on this huge dragon was time consuming. I used so much ink that my 0.1 fineliner was running out. My “snow” drawing is also huge and covers most part of the page. I didn’t use that much ink on this one but I built a huge back story behind this drawing. It’s also interesting and I’m going to make this into a full 3D render. So the story is about this broken robot and the woman standing in front of it. They were close together when she was a kid. There was a war happening 20 years ago and the robot got injured protecting her. They had to leave the city because the evil robots made the city unhabitable. They left the broken robot and after 20 years she came back with her own scavenger group to give her old friend a proper goodbye. Talking about story, my day 4 drawing “freeze” has an interesting story. I was inspired by Mr. Freeze character in DC comics. I think he has suffered a lot in his life, because the only love of his life, Nora is in cryosleep. Based on DC comics he is looking for a cure for her terminal illness. He has also damaged his body in a lab accident so now he has to keep his body cold by an especial suite or he will die. In my drawing I drew him kneeling down to Nora expressing his guilt for not being able to find cure fast enough. When I posted this to my Instagram I found a quote from him in Batman animated series ” I failed you. I wish there were another way for me to say it. I cannot. I can only beg your forgiveness, and pray you hear me somehow, someplace… someplace where a warm hand awaits for mine”. I think this quote really describes my drawing and that’s why I posted this to my Instagram.

I think this Inktober went pretty well for me. I was managed to post an ink drawing everyday and not many mistakes were done by me, except some few minors. Yes, I did ruin some of my drawings by not planning ahead or being outrageous and over working on them. I did some mistakes on “pattern”, “legend”, “treasure”, and “injured”. On day 10 I didn’t have much time left to work on my “pattern” prompt. I decided to make a pattern with some shapes but I thought it’s not enough, so I added a cat to my drawing. There is a pattern in the cat’s movement and on every platform from left to right you can see that the cat is leaving its trace behind. You might not find any mistakes from day 10 image down below, but it’s because I covered it by using Photoshop. When I first used ruler to make those lines for the patterned shape I misplaced some lines and drew lines where I shouldn’t have. I could fix that in Photoshop, but I kept the long shaped platform because somehow I thought it would be cool. I’ve used Photoshop on other drawings to fix some mistakes or even applying colours to them. Day 21 and 29 are also edited in Photoshop. On day 21 (prompt word, treasure), I drew the Apple of Eden from the game series Assassin’s Creed. It was going well until I thought I could create light rays emitting from it. When I started, it looked good but as I kept going it looked messy and rushed. I applied ink to half of it until I gave up and continue fixing it in Photoshop program. The apple looked actually good after removing those extra works, but not worthy of having “treasure” title. I decided to add golden colour to the apple later in evening using Photoshop. I’ve used my computer to add colour to many of my Inktober drawings, such as “freeze”, “wild”, “tasty”, and “injured”. On day 15 I drew Ezio character from Assassin’s Creed game (yes, I love this video game series). Ezio Auditore is a legendary assassin from Assassin’s Creed universe. In my original drawing I did a bad job doing his anatomy but I fixed it later digitally. Honestly I think Inktober was an excuse for me to do some fan arts. Video game or movie related it didn’t matter. Last year I created a few Inktober drawings based on video games, comics, movies and cartoons. I assume it works fine as long as there is motivation to draw something everyday for a month and it works even better if we continue practising and giving ourselves challenge.

This year’s Inktober was great. I’ve learned many things, like perspective drawing, cross hatching shading, using different line weights, and no shame to correct your mistakes later or even come back to your drawings and try to finish it. I’ve learned about human anatomy. Working with different size of bodies were challenging like Day 27. I created a grizzly bear character wearing a coat, hence the prompt word for that day. You’ve never imagine a bear wearing something, so creating it was fun. Drawing the woman on day 23 for “ancient” took me long until I was satisfied. Also drawing Kiki from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” animation took me long. It seemed like I could never be able to depict her face features on the paper. This year I didn’t experiment with other art mediums but I have purchased a white gel pen. It’s a Uniball medium white gel pen. I have used it as to cover my mistakes or create highlighted areas. It’s not very visible especially on white paper but it acts like a tiny whiteout. I’ve used the gel pen on “ghost”, “tasty”, and “dark”. Mostly to bring back the highlighted parts or add white reflection to the eye. Same as last year I picked one of my drawings and I made a digital illustration out of it. This year I picked the day 5 “build” because when I posted the ink drawing to my Instagram I really wanted to see an illustrated version of it. I made a video about it and you can check it down below with the illustration and all of my ink drawings.

Digital version of “build” (day 5 prompt)