My brand new Inktober 2018 art book is now available in the store, packed with 31 pages of inky goodness!
What the heck is Inktober? It’s a yearly event intended to get people inking, having fun, and maybe even improving their art skills. Each day in October comes with an official keyword prompt meant to inspire an original ink creation–just make something and post it every day.
I always wanted to participate, but 2018 was the first year where I found myself with the time–I had no excuses, so it was time to finally give it a try!
It was nerve wracking at first.
See, I’m an artist who takes his time. I’ll work on something forever before showing it to anyone. But Inktober made me work fast and post my results the same day. But as it went on, I found myself having fun and really digging the results! Inktober 2018 became a great exercise for me, in several ways.
It got me working faster and looser! There was no time to sweat the details, so I found myself working instead on broader composition and design. That’s a good thing, as I tend to easily get hung up on the minutiae and lose the forest for the trees.
Things had to stay rough, with more left to the imagination–a great lesson for an artist to re-learn. I’m usually the type of inker who needs a finished drawing to work. But for these, my pencils were often minimal, to encourage more creativity in the inking stage–something I think will help in speeding up the creation of future comic pages. A hand full of them had no pencils at all, just ink on canvas.
Finally, I pushed myself to “art outside the box,” to try new styles of drawing, inking, and finishing pieces. Many of the images in this book required techniques that I don’t usually apply, or have never tried, and a few were total experiments.
All of these lessons were much appreciated. I love the results, and I hope you will too!
For this collection, I went back and fixed just a few things in a handful of pieces. In addition, a few presented here in black and white were originally posted in color – the originals can be found on the back cover.