Inktober 2026 is about to start! Let me tell you about Inktober 2025

 

First things first: Please find above the Inktober 2026 prompt list, if you want to participate. 

All the other things: 

I have yet to complete an Inktober challenge. I haven't been up to the task of completing a picture a day in 31 days since I was in art school, probably. Oh, who am I kidding? Since grade school, when I would draw instead of listening. But wow, I used to fill page after page of notebook paper with drawings of Wonder Woman. 

*Ahem* Getting back to the topic: Despite this yearly challenge being a bit too challenging to complete, it always inspires me, and so I try to go with it as long as I can. Most of the time, I attack it straight on, with a drawing per day. Sometimes I start out that way but fall back on hacks, like combining prompts. Ah, but last year, I started with hacks. 

These really need no explanation, so enjoy: 

Day 1 - Mustache

Day 2 - Weave

Day 3 - Crown

Day 4 - Murky

Day 5 - Deer

Day 6 - Pierce

Day 7 - Starfish

Day 8 - Reckless

As you can see, I had myself a system. It was conserving sketchbook paper, too. Everything was going great, except on the 8th day of October, I lost my job of eight years in a corporate downsizing. Dammit. Well, didn't that suddenly give me way more time to art, you ask? Yes, it did, eventually. But at the time, I was really sad, and I just got derailed. Eventually I arted up a storm, producing absolute scads of artwork, but my Inktober stopped right there. 

Anyway, eight days isn't too bad. Hanukkah gets a lot of mileage out of it.

Fair warning: I am working full time again, so no guarantees. But I'll take another bite at the apple (that's Day 1, folks. See what I did, there?) 

For my previous Inktober posts: 

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-little-backstory-on-inktober.html 

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2020/10/inktober-2020-is-under-way.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2020/11/more-fun-with-inktober.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2021/03/another-shot-of-inktober-so-what-if-its.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2022/04/inktober-restrospective-2020-part-two.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2022/08/inktober-2021-starting-off-with-bang.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2022/09/inktober-2021-did-i-start-unraveling.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2024/10/inktober-2024-prompt-list-and-some.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2025/10/inktober-2025-is-under-wayand-i.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2025/10/inktober-2024-part-two.html

For more shenanigans, you can follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart 

The Illuminated Manuscript Project: Genesis, Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen NIV)

Welcome back to my illuminated manuscript of the NIV Bible, Book of Genesis. As discussed in earlier posts, this is a project that I made for myself to experiment with illuminated manuscript whilst making my way through the Bible, a traditional manuscript for illumination. I try to bring some creativity and fun into the lettering and illustrations. It's all done in a hardbound sketchbook, colored with magic marker and colored pencil, so it's a fun little practice project. Please forgive the images, as it is hard to photograph a book that won't lie flat. 

There's a good bit of Chapter Sixteen left over on this first page. If you haven't seen 15 and 16, yet, here's a link

As always, you can click the first picture to enlarge it and then scroll through the pages from there. 

Here is the first post, if you'd like to start at the beginning (everything else links forward from there). 

Here is the previous post (everything links backward, too. Hooray for completism!)

When I finish the next post, I will link it here:

For regular shenanigans, please follow my Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart

The Illuminated Manuscript Project: Genesis, Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen (NIV)

Welcome back to my illuminated manuscript of the NIV Bible, Book of Genesis. As discussed in earlier posts, this is a project that I made for myself to experiment with illuminated manuscript whilst making my way through the Bible, a traditional manuscript for illumination. I try to bring some creativity and fun into the lettering and illustrations. It's all done in a hardbound sketchbook, colored with magic marker and colored pencil, so it's a fun little practice project. Please forgive the images, as it is hard to photograph a book that won't lie flat. 

Chapter Sixteen

As always, you can click the first picture to enlarge it and then scroll through the pages from there. 

Here is the first post, if you'd like to start at the beginning (everything else links forward from there). 

Here is the previous post (everything links backward, too. Hooray for completism!)

When I finish the next post, I will link it here: https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-illuminated-manuscript-project_02117089741.html 

For regular shenanigans, please follow my Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart

Illuminated Manuscript: E. L. Doctorow, City of God

Since I have been working on my illuminated manuscript of the Bible (or Genesis, at least; we'll cross more bridges when we come to them), I have come across another work that inspired me to create an illuminated version, and that is a passage from the E. L. Doctorow novel City of God, in which the author starts off talking about water, wheels quickly to talking about the creation of the planet, then the climate of the planet, ending in a funny observation. I think it's an interesting contrast to the Genesis story of creation, as this one takes a scientific approach, yet is also philosophical.

In case my italic script is a difficult for you to read, I am reproducing the text below. You may note, as I did, that some of the grammar/punctuation is not exactly standard, but I kept it as he wrote it. After all, it is a quote. I also understand some of the choices that he made are to stylistic effect. I also can't complain, as this is simply a masterfully evocative piece of prose.

“The planet Earth is blessed with water, great slops of it, swaying tonnage of saline ocean and sea, clear blue lakes and fish tremblant rivers, streams, brooks, rills, and pulsing springs, mountain runoff, rains, mists, fogs, and hurricanes. At our birth billions of years ago, an amorphous heap of buzzingly radiant star spinoff, we melted inward to a core of iron and nickel, molten at its edges, and formed on top of this a hot rock mantle and mineral crust.

We began immediately to cool, thus creating enormous clouds of vapor, which rained down into the great craters and basins of rock until the seas were filled. The rock dissolved into soil, granulated into seabed, and the seabed granules salinated and produced the first bubbling nitrogenized, oxygenized possibilities of blind, dumb life. Dead cellular matter flung up from the seas fertilized the rock soil.

We are a blue oasis in black space, cocooned in our atmosphere of nutrient gases. We look peaceful, but we are not. We are a planet of water and rock, sand and silt and soil. The tectonic plates under the Earth's crust move and shift about, breaking the landmass into continents that float and change their shape over eons. 

The plates collide, ride over one another, crack, and great upheavals of the sea floor rise gasping into mountain ranges, enormous volcanoes in the sea floor create islands that bob up in the oceans, the Earth's crust quakes, shivers us into different shapes, we buckle and cleave, storms assail our heavens, our mountains shake thunderous avalanches of snow down upon our valleys, our Arctic and Antarctic Ice floes crack like the bones of God, our windworn dunes of desert pile up to bury us, maniac tornadoes fling us about and thump us against the ground like rag dolls, great floods of viscous burning lava bury our villages, and in all this fury of planetary self-fulfillment, we spin about an axis and roll around the sun, and our oceans are pulled and pushed by lunar tides, our oceans roll in waves which exist apart from the water they pass through, our atmospheres are shot through with electromagnetic frequencies, and we stand abroad our terrains totally magnetized by the iron core at our center, with our skies at night tumbling with asteroids and flashing with the inflamed boreal particles of solar winds that flare like the luminous eyes of saber-toothed tigers circling the darkness beyond our fire.

What a merry planet, everything said and done. For isn't it, after all, livable?”

For more illuminated manuscript, please check out my Genesis series (ongoing):

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-illuminated-manuscript-project.html

For less yadda yadda and more actual art, check out my Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart

 

Unboxing and Review of Jusart Water-Based Markers, 60-Color Set

 

Any of you who have read about my illuminated manuscript series (if you haven't, start here) are probably aware that I've had problems from time to time with colors bleeding through from the other side of the page, which is a bummer. I do now have a small collection of markers that are “safe”, but I thought it would be nice to have more of a variety, so I went searching for a larger selection, entering “water based markers” and “no bleed” as my search terms. This marker set from Jusart seemed to fit the bill, having received good reviews. Some people cautioned about bleed, but since most didn't, I rolled the dice (the set was pretty inexpensive, so no worries taking a chance).

My set arrived, and I must say, it is very nice! Everything is organized in a zippered case, there are more colors than you can shake a stick at (okay, 60), and there are some cool extras – extra nibs for the pens, a swatch chart to fill out yourself (just like the more expensive sets!), and an actual mini coloring book with some pretty sweet designs:

I noticed upon flipping through that the coloring book has extremely thick pages – it's basically card stock. So yeah, the markers are not likely to bleed through that, but...would my sketchbook paper stand up to them? Sketchbook paper is heavier than, say, copier paper (~60 lb vs. 20 lb for the copier paper), but it's certainly not thick like some of the coloring books, which are closer to 80 lb or even higher.

First things first – I swatched some colors. The markers have dual nibs, a brush tip and a fine tip, and the swatch chart cutely has a spot for each one, so I dutifully switched from brush point to fine point when filling the large and small areas, respectively. With some larger sets, I've seen people complain that some colors just don't seem different enough, but even the closest-together colors were visibly different when swatched, so that wasn't an issue.

Time for the moment of truth: testing for bleed. Obviously I didn't want to put these markers into immediate service in the illuminated manuscript sketchbook and find things out the hard way, so I used my other sketchbook, which has the same paper, as a guinea pig. I've been mostly using just one side of each page in this book, so it was no danger if bleed were to happen, and since it's the one I use for Inktober drawings (more on that here), there's no shortage of black and white line art to color in. I chose my cheerleader (Inktober 2021, Day 6, “Spirit”) as a good subject for some bright color, and went to town.

The verdict? Well, these colors are pretty slurpy, and the brush tip is not as precise as a bullet point, so I strayed outside the lines a bit. I'm not super fond of that, but coloring the background mostly obscured it. The color went on extremely patchy, which is typical of water-based markers; going over it a second, even third, time evened things out a bit. Having a nice variety of colors enabled me to add layers of darker hues for modeling and shading. But the most pertinent factor, here – the reason I ordered this 60-color water-based marker set when I already have Ohuhu's amazing 360-color set of alcohol-based markers – is whether my illuminated manuscript would be safe from bleed.

So, once I was finished fully coloring the picture, I flipped the page over, and, sadly, there was some bleedthrough. Just some, mind; it had basically been the places where I had placed several layers of color, either for shading, or, in the case of the background, to try to build up enough color to obscure where I'd initially gone outside the lines.

So, does this mean these markers are useless? Well, they definitely do bleed with what I consider to be pretty normal use, so that's a fail. However, since I supplement my markers with colored pencil for the illuminations, I think it may be safe enough to use them, as long as I just do one layer and sort out the shading and opacity with the pencils. I also think I will have to stick to using the fine point, as most of my illuminations are pretty small, and I can't go blundering about with that big, sloshy brush tip. So with a caveat, maybe they will be okay. Obviously, I would rather color with reckless abandon, but I do have to remind myself that this project is for practice and for fun, and not to make it less so! The markers will certainly be useful for coloring one-sided work without fear, and that is, as we say in the review business, not nothing.

More product reviews:

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2026/03/review-of-colored-pencils-and-drawing.html

https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2023/06/himi-jelly-gouache-color-review-1-sky.html

For regular shenanigans, please visit my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart

The Illuminated Manuscript Project: Genesis, Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen (NIV)

Hello, and welcome back to my illuminated manuscript of the NIV Bible, Book of Genesis. As discussed in earlier posts, this is a project that I made for myself to experiment with illuminated manuscript whilst making my way through the Bible, a traditional manuscript for illumination. I try to bring some creativity and fun into the lettering and illustrations. It's all done in a hardbound sketchbook, colored with magic marker, gel pens and colored pencil, so it's a fun little practice project.  

As always, you can click the first picture to enlarge it and then scroll through the pages from there. 

Here is the first post, if you'd like to start at the beginning (everything else links forward from there). 

Here is the previous post (everything links backward, too. Hooray for completism!)

When I finish the next post, I will link it here: https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-illuminated-manuscript-project.html

For regular posts and artwork, please follow me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart

The Illuminated Manuscript Project: Genesis, Chapters Eleven and Twelve (NIV)

Hello, and welcome back to my illuminated manuscript of the NIV Bible, Book of Genesis. As discussed in earlier posts, this is a project that I made for myself to experiment with illuminated manuscript whilst making my way through the Bible, a traditional manuscript for illumination. I try to bring some creativity and fun into the lettering and illustrations. It's all done in a hardbound sketchbook, colored with magic marker, gel pens and colored pencil, so it's a fun little practice project. 

I have a lot of information this time, so I am going to pepper the illuminated pages throughout to liven things up. 

Last time, I mentioned the bleedthrough from the purple ink. Unfortunately, that is going to continue for a short while longer before I catch it, because of my process. I haven't discussed that yet and it might be of interest, so here is how I do the illuminated manuscript: 

First, I do several pages of lettering and line drawings with my black pen. I don't draw guidelines for the text, just let 'er rip. Most of the time, I'm pretty good about staying straight. I don't want to draw guidelines because I want to be able to burst into illumination whenever the urge hits me, and I feel like working with lines already on the paper would stifle me. 

Second, I go through and start adding color. Since I am working on both sides of the page, I use water-based marker to try to eliminate bleedthrough. Unfortunately, that doesn't always work, and sometimes I don't catch it until it has happened on several pages, hence the purple issues. That was a gel pen, by the way. Obviously, now that I have identified that as an issue, I won't use it any more.  

Last step is adding more subtle color with colored pencils. My favorite brand is Prismacolor (I have two large sets of the prized, older pencils that were under the brand name Berol), but I also use Derwent Coloursoft. I temper the rather harsh tones of the markers, add detail, shading, and color variation to the illustrations, and also add some unifying tones to the page in general with these pencils. 

As always, you can click the first picture to enlarge it and then scroll through the pages from there. 

Here is the first post, if you'd like to start at the beginning (everything else links forward from there). 

Here is the previous post (everything links backward, too. Hooray for completism!)

Here is the next post - enjoy!

For regular posts and artwork, please follow me on Facebook at  https://www.facebook.com/allsortsofart