inktober 2020

Brain coral, to be precise. I found a pen brush in Procreate that does a good job of simulating brains, so I was set.

When I read that they accidentally put dizzy back in the prompt list for 2020 (it was also in the 2019 list) and then decided to go with it because it would be funny and nutty to see what different things people would do this year, I was disappointed. First, if you’re going to do an event only once a year, how on earth do you accidentally repeat the same word? There are a lot of words out there to choose from. Second, because there are a lot of words out there to choose from, choose new and different words, instead of asking people to do the same prompt again.

Anyway, here’s my 2020 version of dizzy, which was nice ‘n quick. THAT’S ALL YOU GET FOR REPEATING A PROMPT, LAZY INKTOBER PEOPLE.

This one had a billion layers and toward the end I was drawing on all of them, whether I meant to or not.

This one didn’t quite turn out the way I wanted. I could have spent more time on it, but in the spirit of just blazing through these and getting them out, I called it after trying and failing to draw rain about a billion times.

I was originally going to strap a Gum Gum Person to the rocket, but it seems to work fine on its own. It still has a pleasantly cartoon feel to it.

I’m still not crazy about the smoke. And despite all the color, I did not use a fill command, as everything was still done with ink brushes:

• Studio pen
• Brush pen
• Dry ink

Outpost at night. Another simple drawing that relies more on the suggestion of detail than actual detail.

Super Spud looking uncomfortable in armor. Some things a potato was just not meant to wear.

Resisting the urge to add giant sandworms (or gum gum people), this was mostly an exercise in shading and simplicity. At one point I was going to keep going, then sat back and said, “Nope. Done!”

The dry brush used in the top half is meant to suggest a starry sky. I think it mostly works, though things went a bit awry in the lower-right area, but I decided to leave it.

The prompt is Slippery, the image is, hopefully, self-explanatory.

In keeping with the season, a pumpkin throwing up its guts:

I have suddenly started to really struggle with the prompts and I’m not sure why, so I’m blaming 2020 in total. I was about to give up on Hope, today’s prompt, and tried just putting down the word to see what would happen. Gum Gum People followed, and so it is that they are attaching balloons to hope, to try to lift it out of the mire (which is probably 2020). There are a few things off on the drawing that I may go back and fix–I don’t like how the balloons don’t really look attached, for one, and the leftmost balloon has its reflective part out of line with the others, but we’ll see. At this point I’m just satisfied to get anything out.

I used three ink brushes in Procreate for this, continuing to expand my repertoire:

• Studio pen (my go to, used for the Gum Gum People and balloons)
• Brush pen (used for the letters)
• Dry ink (used for the mire the letters are sinking into and the shading on the letters)

After struggling for so long last night, today I made two decisions before starting:

• Keep it quick–no more than 15 minutes from start to finish, if possible
• Use a new (ink) brush

I chose to use the ink bleed brush, which gives the lines a fuzzy look. And I finished in around 15 minutes, making only minor modifications to the sketch. I present TEETH on this…whatever it is: