Inktober Completed!
I've completed this years inktober challenge! I figured a blog post would be a good idea since I'd like to share my experience with it and I've not been writing blog posts as often as I wanted to lately. So to start, my goal with Inktober was to push myself by going through the challenge of creating artwork on a daily basis. Its something I've never been that good at, but had been getting better with it over the past few months and figured Inktober would be a great way to test just how consistent I really am.
Well that turned out to be a harder challenge than I anticipated. In the weeks coming up to Inktober, things started to get busier for me with jobs and in particular with my art portfolio after having went to the Portfolio Reviews in Comic Con this summer. I found myself not having much free time and initially backed out of doing Inktober, yet still wanted to do the challenge so I went in anyways, without a plan.
There was one thing I did have in mind for it and that was to create an inktober piece every other day, starting on Oct 1 and ending on Oct 31st. That would amount to 16 drawings which I thought would've made it a bit easier while still keeping consistency, but once I began the challenge I started to realize that I didn't have enough time in the day to do them and had to resort to working on them on my even numbered days. In short, I still ended up spending every single day of the month working on Inktober.
My ideas on what to do for Inktober were each done at random, although I tried to keep the theme mostly focused on halloween as it is October! I had some ideas in mind for a witch girl character I had previously designed and wanted to use. Sometimes I wanted to draw other things, so that prompted me to create other characters based off halloween. There were other times where I was completely clueless on what to draw and ended up doing something random such as the mermaid piece. I did some of my pieces with storytelling in mind rather than a solo character to mix it up and try something new. For my final piece, I felt was a good idea to draw most of the characters I had created during inktober.
My workflow started off in Photoshop for the first drawing, but I noticed that I didn't like inking much in it. With the way the brushes work in Photoshop, inking tends not to feel that natural. In Procreate the inking tools felt better and after around the 4th/5th drawing, I started getting used to it. In fact I've noticed that the remainder of my Inktober pieces turned out to be more detailed as time went on. That may however just be due to drawing on the iPad being more natural than a Wacom Intuos (what I have) and that in turn is more enjoyable, thus I want to draw more.
Inktober was definitely a challenge worth undertaking. I've become better in terms of creating artwork on a consistent basis (posting consistently online is another story), drawing as a whole as well as having gained 16 new artworks to add to my collection, but the biggest thing I've gained is learning that finishing something is more important than making it perfect. I've found that I actually want to draw more when I don't focus on trying to make things perfect which was something as artists we tend to forget about at the end of the day. I'd say for those who have reservations about doing Inktober, try it anyways and see how it goes. You might gain more out of it than you realize 🙂.