All Sorts of Art by Ali: Inktober 2021 – The Thrilling Conclusion (Kind of)

I had to add “kind of” because the word “conclusion” seems to indicate that I finished the challenge. Uhhh, well...this is the last article about it, so that's actually the conclusion I was talking about. However, Many! Interesting! Things! happened before October 31^st, 2021, rolled around, and I am happy to relate them here, as I think you'll be heartened to read about them. It was my best Inktober, yet! (Just forget that the bar has heretofore been pretty low, okay?)

A little buildup, in case you haven't yet read the prior two posts (links below): Having a miserable track record keeping up with Inktober in years past, I decided to do a bit of prep, this time, in the form of rough pencils started beforehand. I did rough sketches for the first nine prompts – crystal, suit, vessel, knot, raven, spirit, fan, watch, and pressure – before the start of the month. However, after posting the first three drawings in as many days, I got tripped up by the amount of work that went into my Day Four picture and started falling behind. I posted that one a day behind, then the next one a couple days after that, and by the time I had posted Day Seven, “Fan”, I was over a week behind.

What should I do? I really didn't have the time or energy to tear through several pictures a night (I was working days, remember) until I caught up, but I wasn't about to throw up my hands and quit, so I weighed the alternatives: Should I just go ahead and continue to post the prompts in order as I did them, even continuing on after the month ended, just to have a full set regardless of the timing? Or should I forget the intervening days (including the two days I had pencilled but not yet inked) and rejoin the group working on the current prompts, as that still had more of the excitement and energy (and less, to be honest, of the shame). I posed the question to the group and got an answer I hadn't thought of: Combine the days!

There were plenty of people making pictures out of several prompts. One person made a pretty cool one that encompassed the first ten prompts, and people got to figure out which feature of the pic corresponded to each prompt. I had viewed combining prompts as being against the spirit of the challenge, which was to produce a piece every day, but I was also taken with the idea of combining prompts as being a different sort of challenge – not only would you still have to illustrate each idea, you would also have to come up with a way to combine seemingly disparate ideas into a larger concept. That appealed to me. I was in!

Day 17 – Collide; Day 18 – Moon; Day 19 – Loop

This unfortunate spacecraft took off from the planet's surface and followed a wild, looping trajectory before colliding with the moon. Good thing the crew wasn't injured, but they are gonna have to do a lottttt of work if they want to get back home in that thing.

Day 20 – Sprout; Day 21 – Fuzzy; Day 22 – Open

My little baby plant unfurls a furry-looking little sprout as it opens up. Proud parents tower above.

Day 23 – Leak; Day 24 – Extinct; Day 25 – Splat

A very sad and unfortunately true story. These guys were money-grubbing villains, and the very last family of its kind was destroyed. The poor splattered egg leaks out the last hope of keeping a species alive.

Day 26 – Connect; Day 27 – Spark; Day 28 – Crispy

I'd been seeing a lot of funny cartoons featuring Venn diagrams and wanted to try my hand at using one to combine these prompts in a funny, intersecting way.

Day Eight “Watch”

The header illustration, inspired by the Black Watch from Game of Thrones. I'm writing about this after the others because it was produced later. As for my illustration of the last prompt, “Pressure”, that's – you guessed it – not done, yet. Buuuuuuut – this article is!

And just in time, too! Here are the prompts for this year's Inktober, if you'd like to draw along: