Fearless Friday, Inktober Round-up

the Painted Apron

5 years ago

I participated in the Inktober monthly challenge,

doing 1 drawing a day with ink, choosing a subject from the daily prompt list

I must admit,

sometimes I was lax about doing the drawings every day

and had to play catch up a few times,

drawing several on the same day 😱

But

I did complete the 31 prompts and had fun thinking outside the box,

and challenging myself to chose the subject creatively and to use different art supplies

The purpose of these monthly challenges is to loosen up and have fun!

Artist’s Network says:

“Remain in your play phase as long as possible. When your left brain starts to take over with its usual ploys of fear and judgment, take a moment to stop and change your thoughts to more positive ones.

Put your ideas out there and see what happens. A painter’s play phase is not about guilt, burden or fear, but about releasing. Instead of trying to conquer fear, invite it along to play in the creative act.”

You can read the entire article here

Inktober prompts and the drawings I created

1 ring, 2 mindless, 3 bait, 4 freeze

5 husky, 6 build

7 enchanted, 8 frail, 9, swing

10 pattern, 11 snow, 12 dragon & 13 ash [from fire]

14 overgrown, 15 legend, 16 wild, 17 ornament

18 misfit, 19 swing, 20 tread, 21 treasure

22 ghost, 23 ancient, 24 dizzy

25 tasty, 26 dark, 27 coat, 28 ride

For the last three I included both the black and white version and a colored version

For injured I added a pale grayish green shadow to the pumpkin lid for drama

29 injured

30 catch, 31 ripe

The figs were colored with markers

The baseball glove was painted with watercolor pens*

Be sure your ink is waterproof if you are going to use a wet media with it!

Which ones are your favorites?

Here are some tips I learned from doing daily challenges:

Set a time limit, like 5 minutes, for picking your subject. You can also gather ideas, photos or objects in advance from the prompt list so you won’t waste time later when it’s time to draw. I use a Pinterest board to collect ideas and refer to

Don’t overwhelm yourself by thinking you must do a masterpiece everyday!

I chose to do the whole drawing in under 15 minutes, staying loose, and letting my pen do what it wanted, not overthinking. If you can, and want to, spend more time, great! Some days I spent more than 15 minutes, but knowing I only had to do a quick sketch made it seem very doable every day.

I also found that if I could keep myself 1 day ahead of the prompt list, it kept me relaxed

I am going to try to keep this up, as I can, during November with the monthly prompts from Doodlewash, I hope you’ll join the fun!