Time for A New "Challenge"?
I saw some reference to “Inktober” today, and it made me think… I’ve been playing around with fountain pens lately, getting a few different colors of ink, trying fude nib pens and more traditional fountain pens, as well as brush-tipped pens…
It’s been a while since the last time I participated in any kind of challenge, so maybe it would be fun to give this one a try.
If you’re not familiar with Inktober, you can look it up and learn more about it than I can tell you—but all you really need to know is that a lot of people set a goal of drawing daily in October (or weekly, or somewhere in between) and sharing what they create. There’s a list of prompts you can follow, if you like, and you can use a hashtag to get more eyes on your work or enjoy what others have drawn.
Personally, I’m just planning to share my simple doodles here on my blog. They aren’t likely to be anything special. I’m going to try to draw something every day—taking inspiration from the prompts and applying them to the basic subject of “dogs”. I may not post them daily, even if I’m drawing daily, and if I miss a day, I’ll just catch up as I can.
I’m not going for realism (or anything approaching realism by several miles). I’m not planning to sketch carefully—probably won’t ever pre-sketch with pencil. It won’t be anything very time-consuming or “good”, in all likelihood. Just playful doodles of dogs. My only goal is to draw dogs daily, however silly or awful they may turn out.
I’m using the same sketchbook I used for a previous challenge—the one that doesn’t take any water—so while I may sometimes use other media along with ink, there won’t be watercolor or anything else especially wet, probably.
The first prompt of the month (though you can do them out of order if you prefer) is “mustache”:
I felt like adding color pencil to this one, and that probably made it look worse, if anything. But I guess that’s okay! It’s all about having fun and just drawing at least one dog-themed doodle every day for a month.
(I just noticed that I dated this with an 8 instead of a 10… I think the “Oct” in “October” always tricks me into thinking it’s the 8th month of the year! I’ll have to fix that…)
Not So Sure About This One
When I was brainstorming ideas of things that might be fun to sketch, I tried to include things with simple, easy shapes. Pills came to mind.
The problem with pills is that they tend to come in a limited range of shapes and sizes. Not the most interesting thing to doodle!
Still, I gave it a try. I painted first, limiting my palette to red and blue. Later, I doodled on top with black pen.
Sweater Weather
Ha! I wish! While the temperatures are gradually ratcheting down (along with the mugginess), it’s still not cool enough for extra or thicker layers. T-shirt weather continues! But another item on my list was doodling or painting “collections” of types of clothing (socks, sweaters, etc.), so one day I painted a page of sweaters, doodling over them when they were dry.
I chose to limit my palette to three colors. I didn’t plan my spacing very well, so the last row was really too much space to fill, compared to the others—hence the weird sweater dress thing on the right. I should’ve just left some blank space at the bottom…
This wasn’t my favorite doodle. I don’t really like drawing clothing all that much. Just not a fashionista, I guess.
Returning to an Old Favorite: Pumpkins
I felt like doodling jack-o’-lanterns again!
For this one, I started with brown ink (in the Little Fat Man/Q1 pen with the fude nib). I went ahead and colored in the facial features with ink right away, this time, and I think I prefer that method, if I’m not planning to paint them “lit up”.
The colors I chose remind me of candy—specifically “Bottle Caps”. I think it’s the inclusion of that soft purple that does it.
More Pumpkins!
Doodling pumpkins again seems to have opened the floodgates. It’s definitely one of my go-to subjects…
I had paint left over on my ceramic palette, after painting the jack-o’-lanterns, so I decided to use it up by painting more pumpkins. This time, I’m painting first and going back over with other media later—and I haven’t gotten that far, yet.
Two different approaches:
The one on the left is how I painted the blue/indigo pumpkin page from the last blog entry. I plan to go over it with ink to bring out the pumpkin shapes, and I’ve left some blank space where I might add some animals. We’ll see!
For the next page (on the right), I painted more flat blobs of color, then dropped in more paint here and there while the pumpkin shape was still wet. This is called “wet-on-wet” painting (as opposed to the “wet-on-dry” technique I used on the lefthand page), and it tends to create a softer effect—probably more like what people usually think of when they picture watercolor painting.
I haven’t been painting wet-on-wet as much for a while, but it can be very pretty, and it’s always interesting to see how the color moves and mingles. It can change a lot before it’s fully dry.
DIY Decorated Pencil Cans
I mentioned a while back that I had made myself some color pencil storage cans, but I haven’t shared a photo, so here are four of them:
I started by saving several large cans. (These originally contained pumpkin puree for the dogs.) Remove the label, rinse them, then let them dry.
Next, I glued/decoupaged some strips of decorated paper to the outsides. I used watered-down white glue and a flat brush I keep just for working with glue (i.e. not a nice brush). These are all pages I made with the gel plate or just by painting with watered-down acrylic paint over crayon, ink doodles, etc. Let that dry completely.
For a final touch, I sealed the lip of the cans with tape, just to be sure there would be no sharp burs exposed. I used what I had, which was this “kraft brown” tape. I didn’t even try to make it even, though you could, if you cared to.
I guess that wasn’t actually the final touch, because I also put cut-up pieces of felt dots under the cans, to make them slide smoothly on the table—and a square of cotton batting inside the cans to slightly cushion the pencils. (You could use an old towel cut into pieces, if you don’t have batting scraps.)
I do find that having my pencils out where I can see them and just grab them makes me more likely to use them, which is why I wanted to do this. You could also use glass jars or ceramic mugs/small jugs (among lots of other things), but I found the cans are a pretty good size for my needs, and they are lightweight and free.
