inktober

Inktober 2024, yay or nay? Or neigh?

HORSE is not one of the prompts, but for the sake of my headline, pretend it is.

As I pondered whether to take part in Inktober 2024, I looked over the list of prompts (they reveal them all in advance now) and whoever came up with the list really likes exploring/camping and the like, because almost the entire list fits these themes. It’s actually easier to list the prompts that don’t fit:

  • Grungy (though an argument could be made for it)
  • Scarecrow
  • Jumbo
  • Violin

Here’s the full list:

Looking over the official blog, the list was unveiled on August 26 with no additional description or anything, but ain’t no way words like expedition, hike, roam, trek, uncharted and backpack are a coincidence. A lot of these words would even inspire the same sketches, which is kind of weird. Maybe the idea is to inspire some “outside the box” thinking by including so many similarly themed words.

In any case, the first prompt, BACKPACK, is not inspiring me, so I probably won’t bother this year. But that’s OK–I’m still drawing! In fact, I’ll post something later today.

To do or not to do

person marking check on opened book
Check ALL THE OPTIONS. Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

It’s that time of year when people are doing things because, for some reason, organizations have chosen to stuff these events into the last few months of the year.

Should I participate these things? Let’s have a look-see:

Halloween

I don’t really do Halloween, other than maybe enjoying some of the decorations people put up in their yards around the neighbourhood. That’s enough for me. That, and watching the Peanuts Halloween special. Also, Halloween is technically just one day, even if candy shows up on store shelves three months before October 31st, so it’s pretty easy to just say I’m not taking part. Maybe some alternate universe version of me dresses up as a vampire and goes out to costume parties to all hours of the night. I’m happy for that version of me, with his suave goatee and all, but it’s just not this universe’s version of me.

Inktober

I used Inktober a few years back to help rekindle my interest in drawing. It worked! I have not drawn much over the summer, for various reasons and thought about doing Inktober again (using my own rules, of course, because I’m a rebel). But today is October 10 and that means 10 of 31 prompts have already come and gone. Yes, I could just wave them off and start with #11 tomorrow, but it would bug me that I was missing a bunch, and I’d try to catch up, and maybe it wouldn’t go well? I don’t know. I think I’ll mull this for one more night before deciding.

National Novel Writing Month

This is coming up in November, as it always does.

I was thinking about whom the ideal participant in NaNoWriMo is and this is what I came up with:

  1. New writers looking to establish a writing habit. To win, you need to write 50,000 words over 30 days, or about 1,667 word per day. It’s demanding and forces you to make time to write, and 30 days is enough time to build a habit.
  2. More seasoned writers who have lost their mojo. For basically the same reason as new writers, a seasoned writer might find that NaNoWriMo gets the wheels turning again, allowing them to return to stalled projects or start fresh on something new and shiny.
  3. Masochists who don’t mind spending 30 days writing what will likely be a garbage novel that will require a lot more than 30 days to fix.

I used to be #1, could make an argument for being an unpublished version of #21Techincally I got published in a Moose Lodge newsletter when I was 12 years old, and mostly feel like I was secretly #3 all along. I’m not sure if I want to invest the time writing to end up with something that isn’t very good. Writing under the pressure of NaNoWriMo certainly gets you lots of words, but I feel trying to complete a novel in that 30 days leads to a lot of shortcuts, sloppy writing and what you’re really doing is trading the satisfaction of completing a specific goal–a 50,000 word novel in 30 days–for the long slog of fixing that same novel and turning it into something readable, effort that may have been better spent just working on a novel without the pressure cooker 30-day deadline.

I mean, if you feel you need the deadline just to get something happening (#1 or #2), I think it’s valid, but you need to be prepared for a lot more work afterwards to turn that dashed-off novel into something good. Because why would you write a novel, otherwise?

Based on the above, I think the odds of me taking part in National Novel Writing Month 2023 are pretty darned slim.

In conclusion

I’ll probably just stick to my own list of tasks, which is chock-full of stuff that I shouldn’t let myself be distracted from, anyway.

Revisiting an old Inktober prompt

I was poking through some of my old Inktober prompts in Procreate and came across the one for Wild (original post). I discovered I had botched a lot of the technical aspects of it (layers are a complete mess, for one thing), and always thought the hills and mountains in the background looked more like a cave entrance.

I duplicated the prompt, fixed the technical bits, then added some muted colours and shading. I like how it turned out! It was fun and enlightening to go back and repair my original slapdash behind-the-scenes stuff.

Here’s a before and after.

Before:

After:

To Inktober or not Inktober

Inktober 2021 starts mere hours from now, 31 days of prompts that are meant to be done in ink or ink-like media. I have participated the last two years, but strangely am still uncertain whether I want to take part again this year.

Part of my ambivalence is the first few prompts are rather uninspiring to me. Another part is feeling I should be devoting more time to structured learning on my drawing instead of doing a bunch of goofy prompts, which can help, but are maybe a better way to “cut loose” than to hone my skills.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens tomorrow!

Here’s the list for 2021: