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Inktober 2018

After two years of attempting to Inktoble my way through the whole month, I did it. 31 ink drawings in 31 days. (Heads up, this post has 31 photos in it. RIP, dial-up users.) As usual with art assignments, I interpreted the prompts broadly, and I gave myself some arbitrary limits: almost all my art this year is on plain greeting cards, and is done with a fairly limited palette of Pens That Were In My Purse. It's a very scientific method.


A vertical pen drawing of a sprig of lily-of-the-valley flowers backed by a single leaf, on medium-brown paper. The flowers are filled with white, outlined in silver, and stemmed with gold, and the leaf's two sides are filled with thick-and-thin black brush pen lines.
Poisonous
Lily-of-the-valley is very beautiful and very bad for you. Don't eat it.

A horizontal pen drawing of a fantastical koi fish between swirling lines of ginkgo leaves on a black greeting card. The fish is in gold, and the leaves are silver.
Tranquil

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Reference Images.jpg

A vertical pen drawing of a cat, loafing in hay, on cream paper. The main lines of the drawing are in gold, with barely-visible white accents, and small dots and circles for dust motes filling most of the image.
Roasted

Broad interpretation is the name of the game. (Yes, there were actually reference images.)

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper of a witch with a pointy hat and an acorn dangling from the tip, kneeling and holding her hands out to a two-leafed seedling. Gold light shines off the seedling, and white light falls from above onto the witch and her hat. Gold swirls center on the seedling, illuminating the scene.
Spell

I'm still deeply proud of the lighting in this one.

A vertical pen drawing on medium-brown paper of a chicken's head and torso, leaning in from right and nearly filling the page. The drawing is finely detailed in black pen, with gold highlights on the feather centers.
Chicken

Okay, so reference images are handy, after all. So's penciling the art before you ink it. This one may never get sent; I love it too much.

A vertical pen drawing on black paper, of an angular dragon head with recurved ram's horns and a wing outstretched over the lower half of the paper. The dragon is in white pen, with gold drool falling from its mouth and a partial halo of out-pointing swords in white.
Drooling

...politics. Politics makes me feel like this.

A horizontal pen drawing on white paper, showing eight evenly-spaced hanks of yarn in a gradation from dark teal to pale, with a bundle of dried indigo leaves in the middle, all hanging from a string.
Exhausted

Wordplay! (When a dye bath stops giving color, it's 'exhausted' —which is one way to get pastels.)

A vertical pen drawing on black paper, showing a female bharatnatyam dancer in a kneeling pose, with her arms held curved up and down, and small golden flecked haloes around her hands. She's outlined in gold, with silver saree and white jewelry, under a gold seven-pointed star.
Star

Really dig this one, and I'm immodestly proud of her hands.

A vertical pen drawing on medium-brown paper, showing three deep fuchsia roses in bud, full bloom, and slightly blown, against a background of black-outlined leaves and gold-filled canes. The flowers are each bordered in gold, with a fine black outline.
Precious

That was too many leaves. Too. Many. Worth it for a cool drawing of my favoritest rose ever, though: Munstead Wood, a gloriously fragrant David Austin cultivar.

A vertical pen drawing of Chirrut Imwe from Rogue One, shown from the back, mid-step, with his staff slightly lifted from horizontal to follow the line of his shoulders. He's mostly drawn in black pen, with red hatching, a variety of black fill patterns, and white-filled belts and straps. His staff is edged in gold, and gold dots are scattered through the background, condensing to define a void halo around his head.
Flowing

I am a nerd, and I also watched a Rogue One gif, like, way too many times to get this done. Not pictured: the quarter I used to get the halo perfect.

A vertical pen drawing on cream paper, in gold pen, of an opium poppy flower and seed pod, reaching for the top edge of the paper.
Cruel

Symbolism, poppies, mid-night in Soho, nine-teen-eighty-four...

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper, in silver pen, of a humpback whale swimming right to left, blowing bubbles. It's a very simple line drawing, with almost no textures or internal contour lines.
Whale

This one became my brother's birthday card.

A horizontal pen drawing on medium-brown paper, of a red bull and a white unicorn in opposition, curvetting around one another. The bull is massive and heavily muscled, drawn in fine lines, and the unicorn small and thick-outlined.
Guarded

Look, I read The Last Unicorn at a formative age.

A vertical pen drawing on black paper, of a series of gold and silver circles nested roughly within one another, and silver and white partial-circles like water rippling outward from a floating bowl.
Clock

I didn't want to draw a clock or a watch...so I learned about ancient Persian water clocks, which are extremely clever, and extremely difficult to draw from directly above so they're recognizable.

A vertical pen drawing of a woman in full-sleeved blouse and long, full skirt, seen from the front, standing and reaching one arm up to the sky, with the other pulled to her heart. She's outlined in black, and highlighted in gold light from the massive pair of feathered wings unfurling above her, centered on the tips of her outstretched fingers.
Weak

That's basically how I want to dress. The ability to manifest huge friggin' wings at will would also be pretty cool.

A horizontal pen drawing on cream paper of a blue-tailed skink, outlined mainly in black, with small sections of red and turquoise, and a rough, sketchy echo of gold. The head is mostly filled with red hatching showing the contours, and the body and tail are more lightly contoured with red, turquoise, and black hatching to give the impression of iridescence.
Angular

When in doubt, make it challenging. Skinks are made of soft curves.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper of an enormous bullfrog, outlined in white, squatting in silver water, with a gold tree branch sparsely leafed out reaching into the left foreground.
Swollen

Bullfrog. Definitely some lingering influence from Pan's Labyrinth, too.

A vertical pen drawing on medium-brown paper or a round-bellied bottle with a tall, hexagonal neck, outlined in black, with teal, white, and silver round facets on the belly, and accents on the faces of the neck.
Bottle

This is an actual medieval glass bottle, and it is vastly cooler in real life.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper of a bird of prey done in spare white linework, with a gold-capped head, carrying a silver branch alight with gold flames.
Scorched

Drawn on the plane heading to Ireland!

A vertical pen drawing on medium-brown paper, showing a black-outlined scraggly tree, bare of leaves, bent over a grassy cliff and nearly touching the black-outlined and white-bordered wave breaking against the cliff.
Breakable

No, I did not draw this in Ireland. I played catch-up when I got home—but it's inspired by a tree I met walking along the Antrim coast, which was crouched over a narrow slash in the cliff, constantly splashed by breaking waves below.

A series of pen studies on medium-brown paper, in black and white pen, showing four people's heads, a roughly-drawn hand, and a simple medieval capital ay. The people are a white-haired and -bearded man, looking right with a slight smile, a bald man wearing glasses and shown against a scribbled black background, facing left, a middle-aged man with a deeply wrinked forehead, white shirt, and black coat with the collar turned up, and a woman with her hair pulled into a loose, high bun, seen from the back.
Drain

These folks were in the pub next door to my hostel, on Tuesday night.

A vertical pen drawing on cream paper, of a teal-outlined and -detailed cabled sweater, with ribbed neck, cuffs, and hem, and lines of diamond cables down the arms and front, and gold buttons in a half-placket from the neck.
Expensive

Hipster card alert! Hand-knit sweaters are expensive, though, and well they ought to be. That's dozens of hours of skilled work at minimum.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper of a pair of shoes, as seen by the wearer, outlined in white, with gold smudge of mud all over.
Muddy

This one features my very own much-abused boots (and feet).

A vertical pen drawing of a white parsnip, separated into an overlapping series of rounds, with a cluster of crinkly gold leaves spilling down from the upper right corner.
Chop

Arteestic parsneep. I was kinda running out of ideas (and the other option involved royal executions...).

A vertical pen drawing on cream paper, in deep green and electric yellow, of sweet-pea-like gorse flowers atop spiny branches. The flowers are filled iwth yellow highlighter, and detailed with a darker, more orange-yellow. The leaves are only outlined in sharp, quick marks, overlapping messily.
Prickly

Gorse! The flowers are really that bright! The leaves are vastly more prickly!

A vertical pen drawing on black paper, in white pen, of a cat smiling as it stretches its paws toward the bottom of the paper.
Stretch

When I come back next life, I want to be a cat that really gets into stretching. It looks so satisfying, speaking as a being with ligaments that sometimes resemble zip ties more than rubber bands.

A vertical pen drawing on black paper, of a silver and white waterfall pouring down a narrow channel, alternately revealed and obscured by the various gold foliage of trees, bushes, grasses, and mosses growing around the path.
Thunder

This is Poulanass Waterfall (ish. I took liberties).
A vertical pen drawing on medium-brown paper, of a small, informal vertical pine bonsai, detailed in black and white pen, with white decorative scarring on the trunk and two clipped branches.
Gift

Bonsai can be gifted! Mostly this was an excuse to draw more trees...and to play more with having the paper be the middle value of the art.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper, of perfectly matched, but slightly displaced, gold and white tigers crouching and snarling leftward, in straggly long grass.
Double

Yes, it's true, I am terrifyingly accurate when I choose to be! Or I taped two pens together. One of these options seems much more plausible than the other.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper, of a silver horse in gold traces, pulling a gold two-wheeled cart over a white-pebbled road, with a gold whip swishing above it.
Jolt

I have no idea what carriages look like. None. They have sitty-bits and wheely-bits and hold-on-to-the-horsey-bits, and I really don't understand how all those fit together into a cohesive whole.

A horizontal pen drawing on black paper, of a white and gold boule of bread, set on a rumpled, tassel-cornered gold napkin. The bread is white on the outside with flour, and shows gold where it's been slashed.
Slice

In this case, the prompt is an instruction. Also, one of my housemates makes gorgeous sourdough bread, and then the house smells like gluten and joy.

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