I was chit-chatting on a regular Zoom social, when my bestie, Jenn, mentioned (this was Oct 1) that she was participating in Inktober this year. OOOoooo, thought I. That sounds fun. I’m gonna do that, too. So!! I have!

I’m using a notebook that I got in Coolidge Corner at the travel store. The paper is super textured like corduroy— Not my preferred texture for most drawings, but after a week of using, has been pretty great, actually.

Day 3: Bulky. I went with bulky yarn. Leftover from protest related hats from dear god, 3 years ago?

Day 4: Radio. Originally was going to do a radio wave, which I did include, but also the different ways we have radio-ed over the last 100+ years.

Day 5: Blade. Blade of grass + Grasshopper. This was my first foray into ink washes. I have an Aquarellum kit, and I decided that their paint = ink. The challenge of water droplets! I decided to not go for broke with hyper-realism, just a gesture of water droplets. This was also the first prompt where I went to the Internets to get a photo reference.

Day 6: Rodent. My hope: find a SUPER cute mousie on a flower. [Source]. I like the composition, how the branch bisects the page diagonally. The flower petals were a challenge.

Day 7: Fancy. Total nerd reference. This is Fancy from Killjoys. I’ve not really dug into portraiture much. It’s easy to get wrong. I broke out the India Ink on this one, which is a delight. I have a water brush, which is amazing for this. I also used pigma brush pens and watered those down for the blue. Fine details the micron pigma pens. Definitely will do a lot more with ink washes for future prompts

Day 8: Teeth. Can you picture that?! I used Crayola markers to color in Dr. Teeth.

Day 9: Throw. I was stumped on this one for a while. How do you capture “Throw” — I was looking at pictures of people throwing each other, trees. Google kept showing me blankets. But by this time it was Thursday night and the meeting of friends on the zoom was happening, and the group conscious said “DOG! Ball!” and here we are. A Jack Russell catches a ball. Adorbs. Like in every other prompt, I start with pencil and go over in pen after. I was a little anxious about how the dog was rendered, but the whole works fro me. Portraits of animals… gah. I think that might be harder than portraits of adult humans but not as hard as portraits of baby humans.

From here on out, I hope to post the prompts as I go with some explanation— I’m absolutely posting to Insta. Stay tuned!