How a complete newbie approaches INKtober. INKtober is a month long challenge created by Jake Parker in 2009, Jake is a comics short-story creator, concept artist, illustrator, and animator. He created the INKtober challenge as a way to help him improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. The rules are pretty simple, create an ink drawing, post it, and repeat, everyday! You can use the hashtags #inktober and #inkober2019, so that other participants can see your work. If you’re not brave enough to post to social media, you can show it to a friend. The reason sharing is important is because we have someone to hold us accountable. It’s like working out, you do better when you have a buddy and it motivates you to do it every day so that you have something to share. Since its inception artists have used it for more than getting better at inking but instead to help them reach personal goals. As someone who has never done INKtober before I created 6 steps to help me get there and hopefully these steps can help you as well.
Step 1: Setting Goals
You don’t have to adopt Jake’s goal of getting better at inking if you don’t want to. Set your own goals, do you want to create a habit of drawing daily? Would you like to complete a series of pieces? Get better at line work? Get better at following prompts? or at a specific subject matter? Or something else completely? Setting goals gives us a clear definition of what we are after and what we hope to achieve out of the challenge. I’ve decided on a few goals that I hope to achieve:
1. I would like to become more consistent at drawing
2. Get better at a particular subject matter (insects)
3. Be able to generate an idea from a prompt
Which brings me to the next step.
Step 2: To prompt or not to prompt?
Jake Parker releases an official INKtober prompt list every year over on his official INKtober website and Instagram. Other artists have also created prompt lists. Having a prompt list helps by giving you ideas on what to create each day so that you don’t get stuck. You can follow the official prompt list; or you can follow alternative lists or make up your own. With the amount of alternative lists out there finding one that challenges you would be relatively easily.
If not, you can create your own to help you improve in a specific area. On the other hand, you can choose not to follow a prompt at all and just create intuitively. Personally I will be following an insect prompt list by an Instagram artist @mezzogram. I’ve been wanting to create insect illustrations for some years now and had no idea where to start. When this prompt list came across my news feed it felt like serendipity. And, as I said you can just choose a prompt list or create a prompt list that helps you explore a specific subject area. Another cool thing you can do to make it even more interesting and challenging is merging prompt list.
Step 3: How prepared do you want to be?
This topic is highly debatable but when it boils down to it, it’s all about personal preferences. You can generate your ideas beforehand, you can create thumbnails of each of the prompts, or you can draw all 31 images before October begins and focus on inking it each day. You could also not look at the prompts until the day of, and then set to work. I personally am still on the fence on how I’m going to approach it.
Step 4: Choosing your supplies
I know what you’re thinking, it’s INKtober, obviously your supplies will be ink, right? Well yes and no. A lot of artist have opted on leaving traditional art for digital, but I’ll speak more on that in my final thoughts. For now, let’s focus on traditional methods. There’s three things to consider, your medium, your tools and your paper. Firstly, mediums, ink is such a broad field and cover so much art supplies it may be a bit overwhelming. Markers, ball point pens, gel pens, brush pens and fine liners are all considered acceptable INKtober mediums. Even if you chose actual ink from a bottle there’s also so much options to choose from. There’s alcohol ink, watercolor ink, calligraphy ink, printer ink etc. Hell, there’s even ink stones if you can believe it. Ink, in the form of a Stone! Mind blown. Then there’s also the subject of color. Do you want to have a specific color palette? do you want a different definitive color for each piece? Or the same color that you use in every single piece? Or maybe you only want to use black ink? The choices, the choices. I’ve chosen to craft myself some alcohol ink with old markers that no longer worked and food coloring of all things. The food coloring was suggested to me by a friend.
Now that we’ve decided on our mediums unto our tools. Like I said, you can go the marker route: alcohol marker, water based markers, oil based markers, Copic, Crayola, sharpie or posca. There’s also pens, ball point pens, gel pens, brush pens even microns. These double as both mediums and tools. If you’ve chosen ink from a bottle some tools you can use to carry your mediums are brushes, dip pens, fountain pens, really the tool is only limited by your imagination, you can use syringes or q-tips for pete’s sake. I will be using a combination of brushes, dip pens, fine liners and assorted pens.
And finally, choosing your paper. Obviously your medium will dictate your paper. If your using markers, you’ll want to use marker paper or cardstock. For wet mediums watercolor paper would be best, cold press or hot press is up to you. You could also use a nice thick cardstock or mixed media paper. You could buy or make a sketchbook just for INKtober or you can use single sheets. Now unto the next step.
Step 5: Become familiar with your supplies
If you’re choosing mediums that you’re already familiar with this part might not apply to you. But if you’re like me and chose something you don’t have much experience with you’ll want to become familiar with your supplies. I’m going to be spending the last two weeks of September playing with my supplies and getting comfortable with them so that I can focus on improving technical skills in October. I highly recommend playing around with your supplies and seeing what colors go together, whether you like the look of black and white pieces. What reacts well with what, or badly. That way you have no surprises come October.
Step 6: Just do it!
And now we’re at the last step, I know, thank god!! I honestly didn’t realize I had so much to say on this topic. The last step is, come October 1st, start creating your first piece and just keep going from there. Keep producing every day and you will improve.
To wrap it up and give you my final thoughts, do what you want! The point of a challenge is to improve. If you want to improve at hands do a hand drawing every day. If you want to do digital art, do digital art! Don’t let anybody tell you how you should or should not create. Make art that makes you happy!!
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