InkTober: The Final Week (and a bit)

Only 3 months late. You forgive me though right?...

​Well, in case you're not following me on social media, I completed my first attempt at InkTober. A drawing a day for an entire month, using a medium I wasn't particularly proficient in. But my, how my confidence improved in such a short amount of time! No-one was more surprised about this than me.

Working with ink requires a certain degree of confidence, especially if, like me, you like an accurate finished piece. Most ink-slingers use an initial pencil sketch to work over so I followed suit and it really helped. But yeah, the final week was incredibly encouraging to the point where I'm now preferring working with ink to pencil, be it the Pentel Pocket Brush, Derwent's Graphik fineliners, or grey Copic markers. My mark-making has improved leaps & bounds and it's all down to practice and that will to succeed.

An easy trap to fall into (and I'm still guilty of this after 25+ years of doing the art) is to expect instant results. Let me tell you friends, that is a very rare thing. You need to fail in order to learn. I'm not gonna lie, it's tough! As a butler once said "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up".

All the InkTober pieces went up for auction on eBay at the end of the month and raised a nice little sum for Kidney Research UK. Three pieces are available in my Etsy store.

​I'll be doing InkTober again this year and I hope you will too. 👍🏼