I nearly didn’t bother this time round, but the bottom line is that I actually enjoy doing it. Each year I have grandiose ideas of making one intricate masterpiece that involves all the prompts and unveil each aspect of the piece each day and it slowly reveals an outer story. Like my failed attempt from 2021. An illustration along the lines of my Unlikely Stories that are heavily influenced by the great Mattias Adolffsen. I love his art, loads of details that jump out at you, sometimes very subtle, but always with great humour.
The Plan
When I started doing Inktober back in 2017 I worked with pen and watercolour which I repeated for 2018. In 2019, I decided to adhere to the spirit of the whole game which was “ink”, but I couldn’t resist adding some colour to the whole thing.
In 2020, I went digital and created my images with Adobe Illustrator, and paid more attention to the template with an inky splat as a background. I think that worked really well, but it was a lot of work, scanning my doodles, auto-tracing them and colouring them up.
In 2022, I returned to the ink theme and managed to stay black and white. This time using an ink wash, really soaking the picture and letting the textures of the ink bring them alive. I also tried to create a theme of portraiture too, they kind of look like a set of old monochrome photos. Some of them looked a little macabre.
So in 2024, I decided to keep with the ink only plan. I’ve always kept with the Instagram friendly square format, but the one knew challenge I placed up on myself was to make sure each doodle was done quickly. What went on the paper stayed there and I kept within a 10 minute window to complete each one.
I kept them really small. The originals are only 2.5cm square and I like the roughness of them once scanned and digital.
I also used a Fude Fountain Pen which really allows for radical changes in stroke widths and can give a real paint effect to the lines. The Derwent Inktense Paint in Racing Green because the black pan was just too intense for my shading. However, the green gave a nice duotone effect once scanned on my rubbish printer.
Check out the whole ensemble in my Flickr Album!