For #inktober this year, I decided I would use the daily drawing to improve in one of my weakest areas - human beings. I would make myself do faces with expressions, and whole-body active postures, and also practise drawing people on old bikes as prep for Two Shillings per Day, the graphic novel I'm working on. But did I manage to achieve this?  Here are all the days' efforts: 

Looking back over the month, I don't think I learnt what I set to learn -- most of the faces ended up just the way I always draw faces, not very expressive at all, nor did I actually do more than a few interesting postures. But there were a few useful results...

- I did get some good practice drawing peeps on old bikes, from looking at reference photos.
- Most surprising, I discovered that biro is really fun! I temporarily lost my fountain pen, and found that drawing straight to ink with biro can be a little bit pencilish - start with very light sketchy marks, gradually emphasise the right ones, and the end effect doesn't look too bad. 
- I still don't really get on with ink wash for colouring. Much prefer watercolour, so I'll stick with that for the time being.  

It was helpful in any case to have a purpose behind my inktober, as it's quite an effort to keep going every day even doing fairly simple drawings. So, roll on inktober 2018... 

Fountain pen, dip pen, brush pen, brushes.... ink wash, coloured inks, stippling.... the object of the game is to learn to ink better, so that means experimenting, which means some of these are going to be a bit rough!

Finished!!

The brilliant comic artist/writer/teacher Lynda Barry produced a truly awesome heart-felt recounting of how she finally got to the bottom of the internal struggle that so many of us go through with everything we make.

I'm so happy to have discovered this, some years after she created it, though it makes me sad to know her own enjoyment of her work had been ruined for decades.  

Until she found her answer to those two questions: 

"Is this good?" "Does this suck?"

I won't give away the end, but if you haven't come across this before, and maybe even if you have, you are encouraged to click right here to see it from her own pen ​as no one could say it any better. It's not very long. 

And I hope I can really keep this in mind from now on. Thank you, Lynda. 




 

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Hallowe'en was the last day of #inktober, and the whole month has been such an interesting experience. I'm not sure what I was expecting, apart from the difficulty of even keeping up with one per day, so just managing to do that would've been a win in itself.

But looking at this second set compared with the ones from the first half of the month (see previous blog), I'm noticing a few things:

- Far more of these are in colour (though this is NOT to say I don't still love black and white). Sometimes adding colour seemed like a way to make a blah drawing a little more interesting, though this also felt a bit like, well, cheating in a funny sort of way!

- Quite a few were drawn straight to paper in ink without any pencil sketching first, including several done with no pencil AND no planning AND using a new brush-pen, just to make things even harder! This is definitely not what I normally do at all; I usually take ages to draft every detail, so this felt rather scary but a good thing to be attempting. 

- Mostly, I had no idea at all what I was going to draw each time, and I really enjoyed the free-flowing silliness.  Well, I've long been a doodler, so that's not so new, but doing it for "public" consumption is different and threatened to make lines tighten up and become hesitant.  Drawing quickly, loosely, simply and well still eludes me but it was a step in that direction which I would like to keep on trying. 

Looking back over the whole month, six were drawn from real life, and two using a reference photo, and 23 from my weird imagination or rather, just appeared on the page before even being imagined. 

It's now nine days since the end of inktober, and sad to say but production has fallen right back again. Damn. So that didn't work very well. Having recognised this now, I shall aim to get the sketchbook out. Yes, really. I'm going to go and do something random right now. 

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On the last day of September I heard that #inktober was starting the very next day. I'd vaguely been aware of this last year, but too late, and too impossible anyway: I'm awfully slow, and really bad at coming up with ideas...  So obviously this was going to be hard, but that's a good reason to jump in and do it, isn't it?

It's now over halfway through the month and I've very nearly kept up daily, after falling behind by as much as three days in the starting week. These are the first fifteen. Doing this sure does makes one think...

1) Hey, this is waaay more drawing than I usually manage and I can actually do it!

2) It's no good just putting any old thing on paper for the sake of posting something, anything, on time.  Though of course nothing wrong with simple - that can be the hardest and the best! Something I've yet to achieve.  

3) In the spirit of the originator's purpose of learning to draw better, it seems right to try things that might not work, different techniques and tools, deliberately experimenting with ways I don't usually draw: straight to ink with no pencilling, only brush with no outline, in public... 

4) However, knowing that I've got to then post the output starts to inhibit me, and I have to overcome that fear of making bad art. Nothing to say one couldn't start one over, I guess, but then would I ever finish? Part of this for me is a desire to suppress perfectionism, which always holds me back. 

5) But looking at others' work at the hashtag can be quite intimidating! A lot of incredibly detailed, complex, amazing artwork out there. The idea is to take inspiration, not to compare.  

6) I think I am getting quicker at this. Not necessarily a result of inktober itself, but I'm noticing that I'm not as slow as I used to be. Who would have thought it - practice works! 
 
​Perhaps there will be more learnings by the end, on 31 October. And I wonder if I will miss it when it's over.