Inktober 2019

This bit I will directly quote from the creator of this challenge Jake Parker (@jakeparker):

Inktober is a month long art challenge created by artist Jake Parker that is focused on improving skill and developing positive drawing habits. Every day for the month of October anyone participating in the Inktober challenge creates an ink drawing and posts it online.

Last year I skipped the challenge due to personal reasons, but I decided to continue the tradition that began for me in 2017. I knew that this year was going to be extremely difficult to keep up with the schedule. Mixing together a job, personal projects, a social life and a healthy existence would prove to be quite the balancing act and it was precisely this which drew me to the challenge, just to test my own limits. 

I really wanted to finish it without missing a day or being late in any sense and somehow, despite everything that came up, I managed that. Usually the focus is on the stories, the messages behind the dots, but with Inktober it was a test of endurance. How do you overcome when you don’t feel like drawing, when the prompt of the day doesn’t bring anything to mind, when you’re stuck, when you’re too tired to do anything, let alone put pen to paper. 

So I gave up on the story bit and focused on the image itself. I limited every piece to 2 hours max, which meant keeping things as simple as possible, although complicating matters is a forte of mine, so that happened quite a lot. Actually, with every individual piece.

In the beginning I wanted the frame of the drawings to be a puzzle board, where (at the end) you could put together the individual pieces and create a bigger image, invisible on the singular scale. The concept was actually developed, written out and pretty much finalised in my mind, but one trip with a friend to a sci-fi convention in Ljubljana turned that idea off, with only a week to go before the challenge began.

In the sketchbook of a featured artist I saw a little post stamp, no more than just the grid of one and, somehow, that little sketch immediately developed a fully formed idea of a post stamp Inktober design.

I also wanted to have a theme within the post stamps of steampunk inspired visuals. The first two or three designs are actually following that principle, but before long I realised I couldn’t keep that up, so that was abandoned.

To be completely honest, some of these drawings I’m not proud of. I look at them and see so many things that could be better, from the idea itself, the quality of the drawing, the composition etc. But every time I remind myself that this was an endurance test, not of artistic ability but just managing to handle the situation and balancing everything happening in my life currently. That was accomplished.

For next year I already have an idea what it might look like. Something really outside the comfort zone, really pure, minimalistic designs, simple shapes and basic symbolism to represent one word. But until then we have 31 post stamps.

Interested in getting a limited-edition print? Click the link below: