Inktober

Have you heard about Inktober? Inktober was created in 2009 by Jake Parker as a challenge to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It’s now a global phenomenon with 1000s of people taking part, usually on social media.

Here are some examples brought up on Instagram by searching #inktober

According to the official website, Inktober is ‘a month long art challenge…for the month of October anyone participating…creates an ink drawing and posts it online…using the hashtags #inktober and #inktober2020 if you want your art to be seen by everyone’.

If you follow the rules, you create art using inks. However, ink is a medium I haven’t used for a long time and I don’t have any to hand. I’ve decided to use fine liners and highlighters because the vibrant colours will give a positive vibe and consistency to whatever I create.

The prompts

The Inktober website and social channels publish a list of 31 prompts you can choose to use, or not:

Here are some of my efforts. I aimed to keep it quick and have fun! Drawing with rollerball liners and highlighters is not easy. I found it tricky to keep things simple and felt restricted by the limited colour palette. It was interesting to see what was possible with overlaying the colours and which prompts I found more inspiring than others.