Day: October 1, 2019

Inktober 2019, or How to Jump Start Your Journaling

And on a similar note, if #30inks30days interests you, then join in for Inktober: 31 Days, 31 Drawings. Inktober was started in 2009 by Jake Parker “as a challenge to improve my inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. It has since grown into a worldwide endeavor with thousands of artists taking on the challenge every year.” The rules are pretty simple:

  • 1) Make a drawing in ink (you can do a pencil under-drawing if you want).
  • 2) Post it*
  • 3) Hashtag it with #inktober and #inktober2019
  • 4) Repeat
  • Note: you can do it daily, or go the half-marathon route and post every other day, or just do the 5K and post once a week. What ever you decide, just be consistent with it. Inktober is about growing and improving and forming positive habits, so the more you’re consistent the better.

That’s it! Now go make something beautiful.

*Post it on any social media account you want or just post it on your refrigerator. The point is to share your art with someone. 🙂

The site has links to tutorials and advice on tools and how to “do Inktober.”

In addition, Goldspot pens (and I have no affiliation with either Inktober or Goldspot) is running an Inktober 2019 Giveaway with writing prompts for those who prefer sentences to drawings or who want to do both. Tom Oddo writes that “In the creative spirit of this challenge, we are broadening the scope of Inktober to include writers as well as artists. To inspire you, we have a list of daily prompts and a special giveaway raffle prize for those that complete the challenge.” Now, there are two inspiring excuses to develop whatever kind of journaling suits your style or to experiment with new approaches to keeping a diary. 

I have great ambition to take on the Inktober challenge, both the “traditional” version and the one for writers. My hope is to turn the pieces into a story, but fiction has never been my forte, so we’ll have to see how far I get with that. 

I did get through last year’s Inktober. Here are few of the less cringe-worthy pictures I drew:

 

Inktober 1 October, 2018 copyright Ruth Feiertag

(I had a lot of fun with Noodler’s Ghost ink.)

Stay tuned.

#30Inks30Days

It’s been a month of inks and pens. For those of us who love fountain pens, #30inks30days, the brain-child of Tom Oddo, gives us an excuse to play around with some of the amazing inks that are available these days. While fountain pens have never completely gone out of style, the allure of deeply saturated inks, of inks that shade, shine, sheen, and shimmer, of inks that are “bulletproof” and more enduring than biro inks, of inks that highlight texts and glow in the dark, has certainly contributed to the resurgence of interest in fountain pens.

The idea behind #30inks30days is that one will use a different ink every day of the month, then clean one’s pen and move on to a different ink on the following day. Ink samples and sharing make it more affordable to come up with thirty different tones and tints.

Then one posts whatever one has written with the ink. Some people just write out the name and brand of their ink of the day; other folks draw detailed illustrations or calligraph beloved quotations. It’s my favourite kind of game — one in which all the players win.

I’ve been posting my meagre thoughts and sketches on my Tumblr, but here are my contributions all together. As you can see, I am looking to place some of my creations in the Museum of Modern Mediocre Efforts. But I am trying to be a little more daring, a little braver, so I’ll post them here too. And off we go:

 

 

   

 

 

    

 

   

   

 

 

  

 

Thirty days of pen cleaning