Inktober + Inktoportraits
Thinking about October drawing.... I have a plan. Do you?
Note: This is my 2023 post (last year). I haven’t decided what I am doing for 2024. I am toying with the idea of drawing Substack writers. I wonder if anyone will volunteer a photo? I guess I’m a bit particular though - I don’t do teeth.
October is Coming!
I’ve been spending time lining up what I’m going to try to do this October. I'm not much of a Halloween person, but I do enjoy October drawing.
I have a plan… a plan that emerged partially from the substack over the last few months, but also a plan that had been brewing on its own, without a container or a home. I think it has all come together as a cohesive idea for a series, one that will have meaning for me. I am not sure how this will go, but I’ve been working on putting some of the dominoes in place to, again, do an Inktoportraits series.
October Drawing
For many pen-and-ink people, October means Inktober.
The first time I did Inktober, I think, was also the year I started drawing portraits. The two things are really intertwined in my head. I had just come out of a really positive summer ICAD (Index-Card-a-Day) Challenge, which I had extended beyond the end of July, continuing for quite a while on index cards. That ICAD series was one with a number of chairs and windows.
I can't piece together now how the gap months went, but I think I decided to do Inktober and started using the Sktchy app (now called Museum by Sktchy) all in the same span of time. I was thinking, vaguely, that I started using Sktchy and trying portraits and decided to do Inktober, in that order. But it may be that I got mildly interested in portraits, did Inktober, and then started using Sktchy. It doesn't really matter, but the muddied chronology bothers me. (I don’t post my drawings often at Sktchy now, but early on, looking for community, I did. My first fledgling portrait drawing posts in the app are from February 2017, but my first Inktober was in October 2016. Podcast notes confirm that I used Sktchy for some of the Inktober drawings that first year.)
Those first portraits were not that long ago!
Part of the Calendar
At this point, October drawing is one of the anchor points of my year. I draw all year, and I don't put a lot of pressure anymore on the "one a day finished thing" mentality. For many, many years, that’s exactly what I did…. a finished thing a day. Once I started drawing portraits, it was a portrait a day. When I wanted to work on larger pieces, and some really slow-build ballpoint pieces years ago, I really had to adjust to what I called a WIP (work in progress) mentality. It was a difficult transition. I remember that it felt awkward to not have something finished to show each day. (Social media can mess with our sense of scale and perspective when it comes to productivity.) I don’t worry about completing drawings every day now. I often pencil one day and ink another. Thanks to Illustrate Your Week, I now work really comfortably in “weeks.” But it took a long time to get there.
Even so, a couple of times a year, I start challenges (whether I finish or not) that really are daily. These are footholds in how I think about my creative year, just as November means both a gratitude project and NANOWRIMO. (I’ve been drifting away from most daily projects over the last year or so. Maybe I really am transitioning out. I’ll have to see how this October goes.)
When I was searching through images on my phone, hoping to confirm the timeline of Inktobers past, my search turned up this comic piece from 2019. It is interesting to look back and see that I was debating my participation in Inktober.
Moving Away from Inktober
I don't do Inktober anymore.
Having never been one to jump on board with random prompt sets, even when I joined in saying I was doing “Inktober,” I was doing portraits and not using the prompts. I've got some weird stickler thing about not doing drawings I'm not interested in or don’t really care about, which extends to not using prompts that don't somehow resonate or have meaning for me.
Inktober is great… and huge. So many people participate. It's so big though that I never felt connected. More so than any other challenge I’ve done, Inktober always made me feel like I’d fallen into a big sea analogy. I was just a little minnow in a big sea of inkers, and they were the cool inkers, those doing edgy (imaginative) comics, especially. Somehow, the mythology of Inktober, at least in my head, made me feel outside of things, in the margins even in a challenge I thought I fit. I was just tagging along.
I don’t think we need to feel cool. That isn’t the point. But doing challenges where I'll be putting a lot of pressure on myself to produce a "thing" each day and yet feeling totally invisible just works against me. (We each have to know what works and doesn't for us.)
So, I do my own October thing now. I'm okay with that!
A Series of Octobers
So I don’t lose track (in the future):
2016: First Inktober, using a composition notebook.
2017: I did individual portraits (one per page) in a small Pentalic 4×6 sketchbook. (First year drawing portraits)
2018: I made an accordion sketchbook, using the covers of a composition book, and did a series of portraits.
2019: I used a cool set of alternate prompts from Instagram (#inktobeva) that had a bit of a fairy tale vibe. I was already working in what became (for many years) my go-to sketchbook, a Moleskine Art A4. That year I worked in a gridded format (very true to my voice and style, especially at that time) and fit my portraits all together. It really was a favorite year.
2020: First year of Inktoportraits in the Moleskine Art A4.
2021: Inktoportraits with an emphasis on some punk/grunge styles, in the Moleskine Art A4.
2022: Inktoportraits + Birdtober on loose Bristol.
(I’ve enjoyed them all, but the 2019 Inktober series stands as one of my favorites. It’s several years old, but I think it might have been one of my strongest series. Getting back to where I can draw that size (smaller) has been a goal for the last few years, and I just can’t manage it. Repeating projects rarely works, even though I often try.)
Inktoportraits
In 2020, I set up my own prompt set, which I called Inktoportraits, a play on “Inktober” + portraits as well as “ink to portraits,” in terms of the words bundled within. I put together my own list of prompts for a series of 31 portraits, and I used that list for October 2020. I repeated that process in 2021 and 2022, sharing Inktoportraits prompts each year.
(Every year, I classically overthink things and spend way too long debating about the prompts. Every year, there are a few I repeat. When you draw portraits, certain kinds of prompts make sense and can be fulfilled in an infinite number of ways.)
In 2022, I unexpectedly “also” did Birdtober. It was a spur of the moment decision to draw one of the Birdtober birds the first day, and then I continued to match them up, the bird and the portrait each day. Surprisingly, there was often an unexpected syncopation between them. It turned out to be another favorite series. I loved it so much, and, giddy with the coolness of the combos I was drawing, I imagined that after October, I would go on to draw people and their bird counterparts (commissions). (That did not happen.)
I know that I am going to have a hard time not doing the birds this year. (My history with birds goes back much, much farther than my history with portraits!) I already feel the tug of loss knowing that I won’t be doing the birds. I always want to do all the things I’ve done before, just keep adding things together, more and more and more. Making choices to “not” do things is hard. It always feels like giving something up.
What I will be doing this year is a series of portraits… with a twist.
I am “toying” with a double twist.
I’ve been working on the prompt set and lining things up to help streamline my process. I think I’m ready. I don’t expect anyone else will be using the prompts this year, and that’s okay. I am looking forward to seeing what happens.
I’m hesitant to say yet what my plan is. I’m really not sure it’s going to work. I’ve bailed on almost every project this year. So I’m keeping my optimism close for the moment. Plus, I’m not ready to dive into the meaning. I want to let the drawings unfold a bit.
A hodgepodge Instagram highlight shows an overview of Inktober and October drawing from several recent years. I need to add 2022. It’s nice to have this as a reference.
Are You Drawing This October?
Are you an Inktober person? There are lots and lots of alternate prompt sets. No matter what you are interested in (flowers, Halloween, fairy tales, birds, mushrooms), you can probably find a prompt set.
Have you picked one you’ll be using? Or will you be using the Inktober set? (I know, I know. There is allure in using the main set. I’m just not into floundering in the big sea. It drags me down.)
Old Podcast Episodes
Not surprisingly, I’ve talked about inktober and October drawings many times! I even found some of my own timeline answers are tucked away in show notes from the past:
Episode 202: Inktober (the first year!)
Episode 262: Inktober (looking back at my 2016 start)
(Links to books or tools referenced in posts are Amazon affiliate links. Always check your library.)
Someone on Insta is hosting Rattober - a month of rat drawing, and I think I'm going to do that!
Inktober feels very stressful to me. The work isee people doing is incredible.... and soooo intimidating!! It feels very high stakes and I don't enjoy it.
Wow, I love your portraits! And I'm with you: I rarely use the prompts for Inktober. It's more an excuse to do my own thing and focus on ink for a month.