InkTober 2017 - Draw One Ink Drawing Every Day in October

My day 2 InkTober drawing.

This year I've decided to participate in InkTober. If you haven't heard of it, InkTober began in 2009 and is a 31 day art challenge to draw one ink drawing everyday in October. Challenge creator and professional illustrator, Jake Parker, started the event as a way to improve his traditional inking skills and it just grew from there.

There's no prize at the end, it's just a personal challenge to get you drawing daily and hopefully improve your own inking skills in the process.

By including the hash tags #InkTober and #InkTober2017 with wherever you post your work online it can also help get your work in front of more eyeballs. This annual event has grown to include thousands of artists worldwide. There's even a T-Shirt you can buy (which unfortunately doesn't ship in time for day 1 but mine should be here soon).

I'm participating in the challenge using the 'digital ink' of my Parblo Coast 22, pen display tablet and a copy of Clip Studio Paint EX. Limiting myself to only the simulated ink tools of that software.

Some people, including creator, Jake Parker, feel that digital inks aren't in the spirit of the challenge (yet the official site has a partner promoting digital ink as an option - go figure) because they believe digital inking is easier in the sense that you can easily erase lines just by hitting the 'Undo' button. There's no commitment to a line once you've drawn it therefore it's not as challenging.

Fair enough but I've been inking traditionally on paper for close to 40 years. There's probably things I could still learn but it would be wasted because I just don't draw with inks professionally anymore. Virtually everything I've drawn in the last two years that looks like ink has been digital. I have no interest in traditional inking... not even for the nostalgia.

Digital Inking with Vector lines. Those points
can be adjusted endlessly.

Despite that, my digital inking isn't anywhere near as good as what I can do traditionally. I rely heavily on the fact that Clip Studio Paint lets me ink with Vector lines that can be adjusted endlessly into an entirely different drawing if you wanted to be that extreme.

I usually digitally ink by drawing all my lines in really quickly, then I go back an edit every one of them into place. No commitment to any of my lines and it makes inking take longer than it should.

What I would like to do is draw a line once and move on, no editing, just like traditional inking. It'll save me a bunch of time with my art moving forward.

With that in mind I've created my own additional rules for InkTober to make my digital experience as much like the traditional one as possible. It includes things like not using the 'Undo' button; not magnifying the page to draw detail; not using the selection tool to resize or adjust scale; and more. (see image)

You'll notice I do allow creating a pencil sketch first as this is allowed according to the official site - and I don't know too many professional artists that don't work from a pencil sketch, either inking over it directly or tracing it with a light box.

If you feel like you don't have enough inspiration for 31 consecutive drawings you can use the optional list of daily themes. I did consider this list, and I may look to it if I'm really struggling, but I think I could easily pull 31 characters from my previous 30 years plus of sketch books to ink if need be.

At the time of this article I had completed my first two days of InkTober. If you would like to follow my progress you can see all my drawings on my Instagram or, if you want to see me actually drawing, visit the playlist on my The Extraordinary Tourist Youtube channel. I've also embeded my Youtube playlist in the player below to save you leaving this page.

My InkTober 2017 playlist

Click the menu in the top left to see a list of videos.

Update November 2, 2017

To complete InkTober 2017 I created this one minute video (below) to showcase all 31 InkTober artworks in under a minute. View this if you would just like an overview of all my artworks. If you would like to know about any specific artwork in more detail, find its individual speed draw video in the playlist above, where you can hear commentary about the work as I draw.

Comments

Movie Review: Memory (2023)

S omething a little different for me in terms of movies I usually review, Memory is a film I was invited along to see by my partner, and both of us didn't know much about the movie going in, other than it was a film where one of the leads has dementia. The basic premise follows adult, special needs social worker, Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), who leads a simple and structured life. When Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) follows her home from their high school reunion the surprise encounter profoundly impacts both of their lives. The film starts out very awkward and disjointed to some degree, which I feel is intentional, to reflect that Sylvia, who is also a struggling single mother, is fairly resilient, she is, in many ways, just barely holding everything together because she doesn't have any other option. When Saul sees Sylvia at their high school reunion it seems like some unpleasant memories from her past are fast tracked into the forefront of her life, and things move forward fro...

TV Series Review: The Office - Australia (Prime Video) (2024) No Spoilers

W hile I'm a late comer fan of The Office, only watching after the original and USA versions were both available on streaming services, I did watch them in the order of release i.e. I watched the U.K. version first. Now, with the release of the Australian version of The Office on Prime Video, I think it's best to approach watching this new version understanding that it is not those shows. More importantly, remembering the US version was not well received or as popular as it has become since streaming became a thing. I personally remember people often saying the original version was better, back in the day. Of course, the Australian version has analogues for all the same characters you're familiar with from the previous versions, with their characteristics, so you can easily see who is the Aussie version of each character. While there are actually 13 different adaptations of the series worldwide, I was surprised to learn this is the first time the boss has been female. No...

TV Series Review: Velma (2023-2024) No Spoilers

A s a kid, Scooby Doo cartoons were something I used to watch fairly regularly. I wasn't a diehard fan but it was one of the better, of the many, cartoons I used to watch. I had heard about the new animated series, Velma , around the time of its release but it wasn't coming out on any streaming service I was subscribed to so it went off my radar pretty quickly. Quite by chance I signed up to a streaming service so I could watch DC Entertainment's, The Penguin, and noticed Velma was on that platform. I figured I may as well get my money's worth out of the subscription. I did know that Velma, herself, had been race swapped for the show, which made no real difference to me, though I do prefer classic Velma if pushed to choose. However the first episode of season one was a real shock to my expectations! No where had I heard this series was skewing very much into adult humor and themes. I was expecting something more along the lines of the original Scooby Doo show. Instead I...

Trump's 2024 Election Win Will Change Everything - At Least I Sure Hope It Does!

Trump by Leonardo.ai & TET A s an outsider looking in on the US 2024 election, right up until election day, it is beyond my belief that the election continued to be a 'close race'. It is even further beyond my belief that Trump won, without question. Even if the Democrats wanted to claim the election was rigged somehow (which I'm sure Trump was gearing up to do had the outcome been different) it would be hard to make the case, beyond a recount. There's no slim margin here. Trump clearly won. While I would've preferred a Blue win, I at least got one outcome I was hoping for. A clear winner on election day. If I could give the Democrats some free, unsolicited advice for the next election. Stop targeting the opposition as if they're somehow selfish, evil villains. That's not how political parties work. At the end of the day the all represent the public. The people. The everyday citizen who you're trying to convince that you have what it takes to meet t...

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices. My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe? Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Social Media: It's All Fake News - Even That News You Shared, That Proves the Thing, Because It's Backed Up By a Credible Expert, is Fake.

Social Media profiles need a peer based rating system that locks you out for 30 days if your feed is one long stream of depressing boredom that bums everyone out. I don't watch or read the news anymore (mainstream or otherwise). From time to time, if something filters through that piques my interest, I'll take a bit of a dive to find out more. The recent US election is a good example. I even wrote a few opinion pieces in this blog. The Daily Show Is Not News Note that I don't count The Daily Show as news, because I did watch quite a lot of that during the US election. While they lean quite a bit toward the left overall, it's not a show you look to for context, since much of their humor is based on reframing context to get a laugh. The one thing The Daily Show does well is highlight how both Liberal and Right wing media latch onto one or two bullet point messages each day and run them through the mouths of every on screen commentator like they're all wind up parro...

Movie Opinion: GhostBusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Some Spoilers

T here's one thing that can be said for 2016's, all female Ghostbusters reboot , and that is, it's not anywhere near as bad as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire . Although you don't realize it almost all the key moments of the actual plot are spoiled in the movie poster shown here. It's a wildly over thought, and overly convoluted story, with much exposition, that boils down to a big end level boss, a beam of light shooting into the sky, all the captured ghosts escaping, and all the Ghostbusters teaming up to clumsily restore order again by the end of the film. Side note: That mayor everyone thinks is a dick is the kind of mayor you want. He really knows how to get things done in record time. I've never seen a building get condemned and the legal tenants get evicted so fast, ever! There's not much here that this franchise hasn't done before, in every film, only this time everything freezes too because... I don't know, I drifted off during that expositio...

TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Search This Blog