The Invaluable experience of planning ahead
A SUMMARY OF 2024's INKTOBER CHALLENGE
For years, during my teenage years and early twenties, I wanted to draw desperately because people around me had said I was talented. I had many great ideas (or so they seemed), and since I had the time, I have said, “Why not?” But looking back, that was the period when I drew the least. The reason? I didn’t have the experience doing something for my own delight, but now I know that, specifically, I lacked a reliable drawing method and did not work ahead of time on what is now called “due diligence.”
If you’re a creative person (in whatever field), never underestimate what you can do with patience, a clear ahead plan, and a suitable method. This year’s Inktober challenge (The one that encourages artists to do an inked drawing each day of October) has ended, and I am very satisfied not only with the harvest of artwork that I completed but also with the valuable lessons, the improvement of my skills and the great people I’ve got to know during this month. In this essay, I share with you all the elements involved in the production of my twelve inked drawings (click below and enlarge).
A straight plan
Jake Parker (the founder of the challenge) sends out the prompt-word list a month in advance to all Inktober newsletter subscribers every year. He has expressed that the purpose is for artists to have a whole month to sketch out their ideas (September) and then dedicate October to inking. So this is what I did.
From past years, I am very aware that making the whole 31 drawings doesn’t work for me, so on purpose, I did the following:
The very day I received the list in my inbox, I quickly scanned it and picked sixteen of them, the uneven ones. I was going to ink and publish one day and not the next.
On the night of that day, I wrote a phrase or an idea for each of those sixteen words. I tried not to linger too much on this because of the risk of overthinking. Some of these ideas were not good, but I left them nonetheless.
This minimal planning allowed me not to procrastinate when it came time to sit down with the pencil and get to work. I already had the mindset and the written idea around which I was going to sketch; the “I don’t know what to draw” would not be a problem.
A well-defined and effective method
Up to this point, I had developed a drawing method that allowed me to create artwork regardless of inspiration. This was key because inspiration rarely visits daily. My method allows me to draw even if the idea doesn’t convince me; putting myself into action is how I’ve created many illustrations in recent years. For those who don’t know it yet, here’s a brief but clearly summarized version:
First, I drew as many thumbnail sketches as possible to explore the overall composition, design, or scene.
Second, once I have the thumbnail sketch I like, I scale it up, adjust it, and add details.
Third, once I know the illustration will work, I scale it up again and do the final line art with the highest and most polished quality possible.
So far, there’s been no drawing idea who has resisted the three steps mentioned above (mostly due to the power of iteration and compound effect). So, on September 1st, I started working on the ideas and concepts. During that month, I made the exploration and working sketches until I reached the final pencil sketch (the one to be inked). Even when I could not work at the pace I had planned, I did not care. I kept going. By October 1st, I had completed nine pencil sketches ready to be inked.
A driving vision
As I posted in my previous essay, I’ve had an additional constraint or “theme” for each Inktober since 2021. This year, it was not the exception; my goal was to put some storytelling or meaning into each entry and apply my crosshatching improvements to them.
I wanted people to stare at my drawings and wonder what was happening in the scene or what the character was up to.
The phrase above encapsulates perfectly one of my main enjoyments when I look at a painting or work of art. So it’s natural that I wanted people to stay for a little while and realize that the artwork was not just an artificially polished drawing like AI bots can do nowadays.
SCARECROW
Here’s the process of my three-phase method for “Scarecrow.” Just like it happened with “Backpack,” I knew what I wanted to do almost immediately after reading the word, but for this case in particular, I knew that the crows would be chilling at a cafe built over a scarecrow. There are still a few things I couldn’t materialize, but the result was a lot like the vision I had, and this is something I can’t be amazed enough by the way I approach drawing ideas today.
It wasn’t perfect; I had to repeat the final inks of one of them, I had to do the exploration and working sketches for three of the entries during October, and in the end, I did not complete the sixteen drawings. Still, I made twelve, double the number of entries I did in 2023, and I am very satisfied with the quality I managed to achieve. The inktober challenge is over, but a new month has started, and the chance we have to put ourselves to work on a new artistic or creative endeavor lies upon us. What if today, we dedicate 30 minutes to draft a quick plan for the days to come?
Such a great insight into your process, Luis, and again it strikes me how similar it is to my writing. I was also told I was talented, and I thought I did write, but of course I had no discipline. Inspiration hardly ever strikes, you have to sit down and coax it into being. Sometimes it can take hours. Like yesterday I was staring at a story on my screen for two hours before things loosened up and I could write my 500 words. Not giving up is key, and it's so good to r and here "that some of these (ideas) were not good, but I left them." We have to allow ourselves to play