I’ve been doing some of Inktober prompts for the last several years. Not full on, just occasionally. Usually, I start and get about halfway through, then life takes over and there’s never enough time. Still I do have a bit of fun, getting to exercise pens that I have almost forgotten about. Sometimes it easy to get distracted because sometimes the prompts can become pretty obscure.
Just before this year’s Inktober I noticed Danny Gregory of SketchBook Skool had undertaken a little project. “How long should it take to do a drawing?” where he painted the same object in three different time frames. 15 seconds, 90 seconds or 15 minutes.
I was both intrigued and inspired so I decided to do a similar exercise as I started inktober this year. First, I started with the simple prompt moustache and only gave myself 15 seconds which is actually more time than it sounds. Then I moved on to weave prompt in 30 seconds, which was an obscure ode to Michel Eugene Chevreul, a 19th century French chemist asked to settle a dispute between weavers and dye makers. His investigations lead to his formulating the Rule of Simultaneous Contrast (of Colours). Which in turn inspired many os the French Impressionists. Next a crown in one minute, but now as I’m trying to do fairly precise lines, a minute didn’t seem very long at all. I just doubled the time allowed for each new prompt.
When I got to 16 minutes for my starfish, I figured there was enough time to create a decent ink drawing. So I stopped timing after that, I normally try to get my pen work done around the 20-minute mark. If I’m doing an ink or watercolour wash it’s fairly easy, but when I do stippling or cross-hatching it can take a lot longer. Dating back to my early cartooning days I do find stippling and cross-hatching somewhat therapeutic You’re just drawing the same pattern over and over again keeping you in the present, the aim of most trendy and expensive wellness workshops. It isn’t really spoiling the fun, just extending it and free!
Remember those days before all the computer tools, when a single click that can now fill in a shape didn’t exist, OK we had Letraset patterns which you could cut out and stick on. But for most ink shading we had to do it by hand.
You can follow my inktober submissions on Instagram @normhansonart
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