In the social media art world, October is basically the month of #Inktober, an art challenge begun by artist Jake Parker back in 2009 where people challenge themselves to draw at least one drawing a day using ink for all 31 days of October. This trend somehow became a craze that even professional artists set aside work to take part in and encourage hobbyists and students to participate.

I have only taken part in #Inktober twice, and I wasn't able to finish yet again this year, but I did manage to make a lot of art in this time. These are the better pieces from what I drew in October.

Day 1: Poisonous

I wanted to take my first day really easy, so I simply used a cheap ballpoint pen I had lying around and referenced a photo by Dirk Ercken of a cute poison dart frog.

Day 2: Tranquil

For this day, I decided to draw two of my parrotlets, Kiwi and Lilie, snuggled up together peacefully which I often spy the pair doing.

Day 3: Roasted and Day 4: Spell

These two actually have a story to them. My parents were away on a holiday, and I was left alone for two weeks for the first time in my life. In this time, I ate mostly bread and fast food, which was starting to make me ill. Then one late night I decided to take the chicken out from the freezer and cooked meat all by myself for the first time. I ate two pieces, with the second one coming out a little burnt, but those were nevertheless the best steaks I had in those two weeks. From this experience, I felt confident enough to cook a Cuban dinner of chicken, rice, and black beans for my family when they returned!

Day 7: Exhausted

For this day, I referenced two photos: one of a kitten and another of a puppy. I just wanted to draw something cute, okay? Also, I used my micron pens on this one. I literally only got those last year so I could use them for #Inktober! Never again.

Day 8: Star

At the time of me doing #Inktober, I was working on this game project for one of my college classes. I decided that on this day, I would draw something related to my game, so I referenced this creepy photo of a doll for this drawing of the protagonist of the game I had planned.

Day 10: Flowing

This time, I wanted to draw a pretty girl because I hadn't done so in a while. Here's my persona Tinker (with long hair and cat ears instead of her current rabbit ears) getting lost in some music like I like to do. I was very proud of this one, but later I noticed I forgot to shade her eyebrows in!

Day 14: Clock

So for this day, I really wanted to practice more of an anime style, so I drew that clock-eyed girl from the anime Love Live, even though I know nothing about her and have never even watched the show. Oh well. I was pretty happy with how this turned out, especially the hair, which I actually rushed.

Popee the Performer

I decided to take a break from the #Inktober prompts here because I felt they were extremely limiting for me. I had watched the crazy anime Popee the Performer around this time, so i decided to pay tribute to it with a silly little fanart. I inverted the colors because it looked better, but then I realized I missed out on making the white stripes on Popee's sweater.

Day 16: Angular

This last one was my last effort at trying to actually keep up with #Inktober. I simply wanted to draw my persona again but in her more edgy look, with short white hair and a baseball cap. Ultimately, I didn't really like how this one came out, but I like her skirt.

Some frames from a WIP animatic...

At this point, I realized #Inktober was eating into my time and taking it away from me working on my class midterm project. I decided that instead I would start using digital again because I truly missed it and began working on an animatic as an introduction to my game and to be used in my presentation of it. These are my favorite frames from what I was able to finish.

Resources

Painting tools:

• FireAlpaca
• MediBang Paint Pro

Inktober:

• Inktober Website
• Inktober Twitter
• Jake Parker