Image source: Merlina McGovern
The end of October is in my sights. I committed to completing an ink sketch every day for 31 days to participate in the 2023 Inktober challenge. There is no monetary prize. My drawings aren’t published anywhere except on my own websites and social media. The only thing I get at the end of this project is the satisfaction of setting a challenging goal for myself and completing it. Every year, I contemplate skipping out on the challenge, and every year I commit myself to it anyway, and every year I feel a true sense of satisfaction when I complete it.
Of course, as this post title says, I’m rushing through to the end here, and I’m actually not completely done with the challenge. I have one more day to go, and I will finish this on Halloween night. Today, I only had about 20 minutes to complete my sketch.
In this post, I thought I’d explore a little of my creative process when it comes to creating these ink sketches. When I first started doing this challenge several years ago, I spent most of my time finding reference photos and then sketching those photos on paper using a graphite pencil. I would then use ink to go over those pencil sketches.
One year, I tried to do the project digitally using the drawing program Procreate on my iPad. However, that didn’t really feel true to the spirit of the challenge, and I’ve learned that while I can do digital art (and I sometimes even enjoy it), I actually truly love the feel of analogue art. I love the feel of a pen in my hand. I love the feel of graphite scratching on sketch paper. It’s so satisfying watching the graphite rub off onto the teeth of the paper texture and seeing the ink stain the white paper black. The feel of an Apple pencil on glass makes my skin crawl sometimes. I know that there are some films you can buy to help approximate the feel of paper, but, hey, why not just use paper in the first place?
Now, I try to only do this challenge on paper using inks. Over time, I learned how to use different pen sizes. When I’m using my micron pens, I’ll typically use the 0.5 pen size for the outer line drawing, and then I’ll use the 0.2 size for the finer details and for a lot of the cross-hatching. My hands are now getting quite old to be doing fine cross-hatching across large sections of paper, so I’ve started to divide my sketch papers up into multiple entries so that my drawing area is smaller for each sketch. I also use white acrylic paint pens and white gelly roll pens to add very light highlights to my ink sketches. Over time, I also learned to use kneaded erasers, which are so much gentler on the paper and don’t leave annoying eraser pieces when I erase my pencil sketch.
Maybe next time I will experiment with black watercolors so that I can add shadows and deeper blacks to larger areas of paper without killing my hand in the process. Of course, that would then mean that I’d have to use watercolor paper for my sketches, which is a bit more expensive than the cheap sketchbooks I currently use.
As for the ideation process, in my earlier years of drawing through Inktober, I would do a lot of reference sketches. I didn’t really feel comfortable enough with my visual library to attempt to do many drawings straight from my imagination. Over the years, I have definitely become more comfortable drawing from my imagination. This year, I decided to have a lot of the sketches follow a group of Halloween ghosts through the prompts, and that simple shape has allowed me to be freer with my ideas and my drawings.
So, even though I was a bit rushed with this second-to-last entry, the prompt was rush, I was able to think of a concept and carry through with it in a short amount of time, which made me feel a whole lot better at not having a ton of time to complete the sketch. And now, just one more day. What will that final sketch bring?
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