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inktober retrospective

• october 2019

inktober

is upon us—which means it’s time climb out of the coffin and get those inks and watercolors out. since this will be my 4th year participating, here’s a look back at how much of my professional growth this challenge has seen ~

Illo-Campire
Illo-SharkVampire

2015 & 16

my first year of inktober
real talk: i have never run a marathon, but this is what i imagine it feels like!

getting into this challenge was fully without grace but i made it all 31 days. i was exhausted creating content that felt okay to post every-day-no-matter-what, even if they were only meant to be simple ink drawings. wish i could say i planned, or followed a prompt list, or sketched ahead of time—but that was not the case. it was rough.

since then i’ve grown a lot.

here’s a look back <3

2015 (left), 2016 (right)
pen and ink VS inkwashes+

fun fact: i moved from columbus to seattle in the middle of Inktober 2016.

2017 

color and animation.
having survived two years of doing inktober, i stopped telling all my friends that i was functionally dead-to-the-world between september and november.

i discovered Mab Graves’ #drawlloween club and prompt list. i also started incorporating watercolor for pigment. the drawlloween community was super inspiring.

Illo-GhoulLove
inktober_18
inktober_5
Watercolor surf swamp monster with neon pink surfboard.

2018

inspired by the work of #mabsdrawlloweenclub and Mab Graves’ ambitious octobers, i wanted to do full paintings for both technical and portfolio reasons.

these each took about 3-6 hours, concept to final—sketching, re-drawing, painting, scanning, retouching for dust, and color correction. overall this comes to roughly between 90-180hours total—nothing to shake a stick at.

2018: full color illustrations, every day for 31 days. this is sort of where i draw the line for now (with a full time job.)

2019 🦇

this year i’m looking at a back to basics — environmental/atmospheric ink + a new render of digital illustration that I’ve been working on since 36 Days of Type.

there is a small meetup i’ve started for seattle.

hope you join. happy haunting ~

Illo-WitchNap-Meetup

• october 2019