Inktober 2018

The month of October has become an annual inking challenge for anyone with a pen! All's you gotta do is draw something (preferably with a utensil that uses ink, though it's not required) once a day every day for 31 days. The founding Inktober folks even provide a word prompt to help inspire, and it's fun to see how hundreds of people interpret the same word differently. 

My relationship with drawing is... weird. Like, obviously I draw almost every day because of Oh Joy Sex Toy.  At the same time, I rarely draw outside of that, for fun. I know I could  improve so much more if I'd just commit to sketching every day and attending weekly life drawing sessions, but I just... I'm so tired, you guys. I  don't know. I don't like to draw unless I have an assignment, a REASON to draw that serves a purpose. Which is why Inktober is such a great fit for me! I fucking thrive on having that little word prompt, it fills me up with ideas. 

Last year I chose octopuses as my theme, and drew them in relation to each day's word. This time around I went with beets, thanks to a keen suggestion from my studiomate Maria Frantz. 

I've been posting my pieces as I complete them up on Instagram, if you wanna follow them in real time. Otherwise, I'll share 'em here in batches of 10.

1. Poisonous

When I saw “poisonous” is our word of the day, I immediately remembered Matt and I discovering a lone, neglected beet we had wrapped up and forgotten in the back of our fridge. It looked like the equivalent of a rat that had been run over and then naturally mummified— you’ve seen them along the side of the road before. They’re somehow simultaneously decomposing and also stiff as a board.

So that’s what I drew, as best I could remember it. I’m not google image searching for photo reference, nothankyou.

2. Tranquil

Drawn from a photo of Ms. Han Solo, one of my kitchen beets. She lives in a little yellow pot all by herself, the very picture of tranquility.

3. Roasted

Diced and roasted beets, obviously U_U

4. Spell

It's spelling U_U

5. Chicken

I apologize for this beetchicken monstrosity I have brought into your feed. HAPPY NIGHTMARES.

6. Drooling

No, there’s not really any connections between the prompt and my drawing. I dug through my archive of beet photos looking for anything that might strike me as “drool-worthy” and settled on this close-up of a fat baby leaf springing up between all these luscious, ruby stalks on the top of a bulb. The photo is juicer. 

7. Exhausted

This was a yellowing leaf that I trimmed off one of the kitchen beets but I couldn’t bear to throw it in the compost bin because it still had such a lovely shape. I laid it on the floor and took a few reference photos from different angles before tossing it and now, today, I finally got to put one of them to use. Exhausted. A lone, dying beet leaf, resting on the floor for a second before joining the leftover eggshells and food scraps.

8. Star

Top-down view of one of my beets from the Great Summer Harvest.

9. Precious

Sweet lil’ bb beet seed sprouting. Drawn from my archive of photos documenting every stage of my beets’ development. You know. Like what a normal person would make.

10. Flowing

I went with this little beetling from my photo archive because the nice rolling motion of it reminded me of today’s word prompt.