Up your ink game: Successfully completing Inktober

1. Introduction: Hi. Have you ever heard of ink tuber is October is a great thing to really stretch yourself with pen and ink or just any kind of ink application you can think of. And it's something that a lot of people do worldwide and it's something that will really keep you on your game. But sometimes people have questions like, well, how do I do it? How do I get started? And are there any rules have to follow in this Skillshare? And we're going to talk about how to rock your first October. So what are we going to talk about in the entire class? But we're going to talk about what October is and how it works. I'm going to go through a longer discussion about supplies and you might think is necessary. So we can talk about different ways of putting ink on supports. We're going to talk about different ways you can do a successful October. Then I want to show you some highlights or my 2020 October. And I want to show you what I was thinking about when I was doing each of the individual drawings, at least the ones I'm going to show you. And finally, we're gonna talk about the class project, which is all about setting a goal and drawing some pictures. So what does he told her? Well, it's a month long series of prompts typically done in October. Now if you go to October.com, you're going to see that the prompt list is typically released early, usually sometime in September or even before. So in theory, you don't have to do ink tuber in October, but it's kinda fun to work with everyone else who's around the world and doing all the October stuff at the same time as you. There is a couple of ways to do it and we'll talk about them. The big one is called the marathon typically, and it's where you draw one ink drawing every day now, that's not something you have to do. But if you want to finish in october, start to finish every single prompt. That's typically what people sign up for. You then share your drawings every day on social media, typically using the hashtag October. And the goal is to learn, grow, and make cool art. I want you to keep that goal in mind as you do your October drawings. Because sometimes what if he can't get to it that day? What if it's too hard to prompt whatever it is, The goal is to learn, grow, and make cool art. The goal isn't necessarily stress yourself out. So how does it work? Well, the prompt lists are available at www.October.com. There are technically no official rules that is to say that October is really more of a personal project. Now, what you do has to be an ink. That's really the only rule. And would ink means is typically pen and ink or depends or brush and ink and that sort of thing. Although their husbands, some really interesting work recently done with digital ink. So using the Pen Tool, for example, in procreate, I personally always work specifically in pen and ink or a brush and ink. Now in toolbars, official rules call them drawings. And if you use a brush, for example, you might want to call it more like a painting. It doesn't really matter as long as you're using ink or sometimes digital ink and you're putting it on some kind of support or a digital format, then you're doing a October. You control how much effort you put in. So a lot of people, especially if you look at their Instagrams, they're showing incredible in October drawings. I personally don't know how people can do that day in and day out for the entire 31 days of October. And it's amazing to see what they can do. But don't measure yourself up against somebody else. If they have an amazing Instagram and you're sitting there and you just did a couple of Zhuangzi really proud of. That's good. You should really be proud of yourself because remember, the goal is to have fun. The goal isn't to compare ourselves to others. Recently there's a new way of doing a October which is called ink Toby 52. So October itself is a month long event and all prompts are released at once. And actually for 2021, you can go to ink toolbars website right now and take a look at the entire prompt list. In Tilburg 52 is something a little bit different. It's a year long event where you do one thing per week. So the prompts are at least once per week. The idea then is to do one drawing per week in October 52 is a little bit easier for people who have time constraints, especially because in a job or if you want to do the entire thing, you have to do a drawing in pen and ink every single day. If you do inked over 52, then what you're really looking for is a once a week drawing challenge that you can take multiple days for it doesn't really matter. So thinking about your own goals and thinking about what's best for you. So now I think it's time to get ready, get some Incan, some paper, or at least go to the next video. We're gonna talk about different supplies. 2. Supplies: All right. Let's talk about the supplies that I use for October and then some things you might consider in your owning Tolbert journey. So there's a bare, bare minimum for using October. And for the rest of this course, I'm going to assume that you're not doing anything digitally, you're using traditional media, and therefore you need some kind of ink. You need some kind of way to apply that ink. And you need something to apply the ink on. That is the only real restriction if you're doing traditional media based in October. Now there's many different types of ink, many different pens, we'll talk about those. But as long as you have some ink, some way to apply it and something to apply the ink on, then you're ready to doing Toby. Now there's a ton of different types of pens you can use. And if you've ever gone to an art store and you've gone to the pen ILD, and you'll notice that there's a ton of different options and they might be overwhelming. So the first one we're gonna talk about is a standard ballpoint pen. Ballpoint pens are actually incredible. Here's a drawing that I did while I was in a meeting. This wasn't an October drawing. And you can get an incredible range of values with ballpoint pen by pressing harder and by marrying the angle that you are using the pen width. They're cheap and they're very readily available. Now one thing you do need to consider depending on your goals for October and your goals for your art is that ballpoint pens may not be archival. What that means is that they might fade over time, especially the cheaper pens. If you keep your drawings out, maybe you have it on acid paper. So something like just a basic notebook that isn't really going to stick around is going to yellow, then your drawings also might start to yellow over time. Now if you are just drawing for fun, you're just drawing a utopia this year and you're not really going to be too concerned about archival stuff, then a ballpoint pen is a fantastic place to start. In fact, I'll bet you, you have all the supplies you need to start right now. A ballpoint pen and some paper. A fine liner is more traditional. So a lot of more people are going to be using fine liners, especially if you look on their Instagram, you're gonna see a lot of people using fine liners, further art, you can get exceptional detail and fine liners. And it is almost always archival depending on the brand who use. And I'll show you the brand that I use when I talk about my own minimal art October kit. They earn more expensive by far. So if you buy a good fine liner pen, you're looking between 3, $5, whereas a ballpoint pen you can get like 12 for a dollar. And they're also found in multiple sizes. So that is good and bad. When you go to the office supply store and you buy a ballpoint pen, you just buy a pen and realistically the precise size of the ball is rarely a consideration for many people. When you're looking at the wide range of fine liners. And if you've never really use a fine liner before, you're not sure about the size you should be using, it's kinda overwhelming. So if you have fine liners, I recommend going for it. If you don't, then I recommend buying something like a 01 and I'll show you what that means later. And that's something that is relatively small for fine details and relatively big fulfilling some soften. Now there are other types of pens and here's one of the October drawings I did last year. This one was for the prompt that said float and I wanted to have a little bit of fun. So I said, Well float friends with goat. I like goat. So let's go ahead and draw goat. And in this one, I actually use a dip pen. So this was something where I had an actual bottle of ink and a couple of different types of nibs. And I dipped my pen into the Incan and drew with that. And the benefit of using a dip pen is that I had many types of ink I could use. This one was done in India ink. And I had many types of nibs that I could use. And you can actually see the different nibs in this drawing, especially on the nose of the goat and then all along the, the horns and everything else. So if you look at the body of the Gotan, the horns, you'll see that I used lines and crosshatching and that's because I was using a smaller nib. And then on the nose, I went to a much bigger net, but I was able to fill in larger areas quickly and in more detail it with much more ink on the paper. So a dip pen was really nice for me, but there was also the first time it ever use a dip pen. And honestly, if you don't have it depend, you don't have to go and buy one. A fountain pen is also used a lot. There actually the favorite architects, especially for architectural drawing and specifically because if you're really good at controlling the nib of a particular type of fountain pen, then you can get thick and thin lines in big areas of Incan so on. They can be really expensive. So just be aware of that if you're having a fountain pen, that's great. If you don't have a fountain pen, maybe in October is not the best time to go and buy one. And they are a little bit harder to get used to. So if you're thinking about your bare minimum kit, I'd recommend a ballpoint pen, maybe a fine liner. If you have these things which I happened to have these pens, then I wanted to play around with them frame toppers. That's why I did this one in depend. Now let's talk about paper. So at some point, you're going to have to apply your ink to paper. And if you look at the different types of pens you have, then the different types of paper are going to make a difference. And here's an example of that. So this is a, just a circle that I drew on Dollar Store quality sketch book paper. So I used to have a dollar store sketchbook cost like two or $3. And it was great for practice, but it didn't take ink very well. And so with this one here was, is I put some ink on and you'll see that it's sort of blend. This is called the bleed where you have the ink sort of going out in different tendrils all over the place. And it also smudged as well because the EQ just wasn't going into the paper fast enough. So that's what happens when you have relatively low quality paper. Now the upside is that if you have a ballpoint pen well that works on just about any type of paper you have. They're designed to write in cheap notebooks, that sort of stuff. If you have a wet pen though. So a fine line here, for example, a dip pen or a fountain pen, you typically will need a sturdier paper that can absorb the ink well, so just consider that. Now if you go to an art store, you're going to see that there's a difference between sketching paper and drawing paper. And then you have a bunch of different specialty papers. There's actual pen and ink paper and there's a ton of other things. If you're just starting out, you've never really done a lot of pen and ink stuff before. You don't need to go too crazy. But if you're thinking about maybe you want to do something archival, maybe you want to sell your work. Moving on to a more expensive papers, a good idea. So high-quality sketch paper, it takes int, okay, it's fine. And here's what happens. The difference, right? So if you're thinking about, should I spend the extra money on drawing paper and not well, let's talk about that. Sometimes the sketch paper, you can get bleeds, especially if you're using a wet medium. So especially if you're using a dip pen or a brush, now it is a lot cheaper. So you can buy a 100 sheets of sketch paper That's really good quality may be for $20, whereas you only get 40 sheets of drawing paper for the amount. And sketching paper I found usually absorbs ink. So you're drawing might be a little bit dull. On the other hand, if you have a proper drawing paper or even really penning paper, your drawings become very vibrant because the ink doesn't just soak in and sort of distributed throughout the paper. Sometimes this can take a lot longer to dry on drawing paper. So it's a trade off depending on what you want from your art. Some people will use watercolor paper, and that's something very good to use because watercolor paper is designed for wet media. You just need to be aware of a couple of things. When you go and you buy some watercolor paper, you have two options. Typically, one is called cold press and hot press. Cold press paper typically has more texture. So for watercolor, that's okay because you want to have the texture of the paper showing through and it looks kind of cool when you have these watercolor effects on the textured paper is called having a lot of tooth. If you have a hot press paper, it's going to be much smoother when you're working in pen and ink because you typically have such small nibs and you want some fine detail. A cold press paper is harder to get fine lines and fine details because of that texture, your pen will bounce all over the paper. A smoother hot press paper though, that's going to help you to get those nice fine lines. Now the benefit of using watercolor paper is that it takes ink extremely well. It's literally designed for heavy applications of wet media. So I'm going to show you an example when I go through the tour of my October 2020 where I used Incan brush. So I had a bottle of ink and a brush and I brushed it on almost like a painting. And I could not do that on my sketchbook paper. It just wouldn't work. It wouldn't ever take the ink like that because there was a really heavy application of wet ink, whereas my watercolor paper worked really well. But now let's talk about something you probably already have, which is inkjet printer paper, ink jet printer paper is astonishingly good for pen and ink work. Why? Well, because it's designed to take ink, that's what it's for. You literally have a printer that's spraying ink onto the paper. And so this paper is designed for you to put ink on it. It's also extremely cheapest, probably the cheapest type of paper I can find, except for notebook paper and that sort of stuff. So you can get a 1000 sheets for $10 or whatever it is and you probably have some right now. It's nice and smooth. You can make some fine lines. And if you screw up the drawing, it doesn't really matter. You just throw it out because that piece of paper costs you only a little bit of money. On the other hand, the downside to this paper is that you don't really have any guarantees is going to be archival. And if you want something in a nice book, well, inkjet paper typically isn't in that, but a lot of people use inkjet printer paper because it's really good for ink. So don't throw away office supplies. These two things fill up my minimalist in october kit. This is the only thing that I tend to use on most days. And then I'll typically bring things in if I want to do a little bit of experimentation or if I'm doing a more complicated drawing, typically use pencil first, I'll talk about that in a minute. So I use a Pigma Micron and typically the size that I used as an O1. Now keep in mind that's not point. Oh, one millimeters or something like that. That would be tiny, tiny. This actually is about 0.25 millimeters. I believe the 001 represents the fraction of in it. So I think this is a 0.01 inches, which is approximately 0.25 millimeters. And I actually use Strathmore sketch paper. This is a really good all around paper. It doesn't really make for archival art, so it's pretty thin. And that means that if I'm doing anything with really heavy applications of ink, typically I will go to a watercolor paper, but I like to have all of my sketching stuff into a nice book. I like Strathmore paper and I think it works really well. So this is my absolute minimal October kit. This is something that if I don't have this, then personally I can't do anything to her stuff. Other things that you might want to pull the pencil is a really good idea. There's nothing wrong with doing a pencil under drawing. In fact, it's specifically stated in the October rules that you can have a pencil under drawing and with a pencil and eraser. One of the things people are typically most scared about with ink is that it is not erasable. It's permanent as soon as you put that mark down, It's there. Now sometimes this is really fun because what it means is it loosens you up. You have no choice but to deal with that Mark Cuban put on other times, especially if you're really wanting to spend a lot more time on the drawing and make it really, really nice. Having an under drawing, It's really good. You might want drawing tools. There's nothing wrong with using a ruler or compass whenever it is you want to do sometimes if you just want to circle, he was a plate, write something on those lines. And if you are going into ink and wash your inking brush, then typically what you're going to want as well brushes and actual liquid ink. Now with there are saying a lot of times is what can I use color in October? The answer is sure you can do whatever you want as long as there's ink involved somehow, then you're doing a October that's perfectly fine. But what is typically recommended is because it's supposed to be fun and small, is to keep the colors to a minimum and focus really on the ink work if you want to do a drawing and maybe an urban sketch, for example, that still counts as an interlobar sketch. But usually what you'll wanna do is have a little bit of fun and restrict your supplies just to ink so it's up to you. But most people do not. 3. Tips for success: Alright, now let's talk about some tips for a successful ink October. So how can you make your ink tuber the best that it can be? The first thing I want you to think about is to think about your time. Working with pen and ink takes a very long time, especially if you want to build up some really deep areas of value. So how much time do you have each day to devote to it? And it can be as low as a couple of minutes and as much as hours and hours and hours. Some people who are doing october do incredible work, but it takes them many hours to get their work done. Do you have more time on specific days like the weekends? So if you look right now at the prompt list and you can line it up with the days in October and you can look at the days of the week, then you can determine, oh, well, this prompt is coming up on a weekend. I can spend more time on that. So maybe start thinking about those prompts, the ones where you can spend two or three hours on them. And maybe use those prompts as your big drawings. The ones that are really, really going to, at the end of the day, you're going to show people and the rest of them, or maybe a more experimental or quick sketches, that sort of thing. And then can you set aside a specific time each day or is it random for me? I set aside time in the morning before I have to do anything else before I go to work or anything else, I have my time to do my drawings and typically that various somewhere between five minutes depending on when I woke up that day or an hour and a half. For other people, it's completely random whenever they can sit down. If it's random for you, what you might want to consider is to restrict yourself to maybe five minutes or so as a minimum. And that way if you just get a drawing out, then you've succeeded, right? Set yourself up for success by not expecting to be able to have three hours every day. If that's not your lifestyle, then I want you to set a goal in October is self-directed. So realistically, you can just go and get the prompt list right now and blow through all 31 of them and then you're done. You can do this in one day. But that's not the point giving Tolbert. So it's really good to have a goal. And here's some examples that I've personally used in the past. A very common one. Well, I want to do any drawing every single day. A very, very common, very valid goal. Frank told her other people maybe they want to do an ink drawing every some number of days, maybe every other day, maybe every week. Maybe you just want to explore a different, different ink and different ways of drawing it. Sometimes prompts just don't speak to you. So for example, in 2020 there was a problem called wisp. And to me I didn't really have any ideas for wisp and so I just started drew something through it together. But realistically I could've avoided that entirely and said, Well, you know what, this isn't really the prompt for me. I'm not gonna do it, right, so it just fits within my goals and it has, it helped me to define success. Maybe you want to try out and has many different ways of using maybe your fountain pen or maybe your ballpoint pen or whatever it is. Maybe that's your goal. Maybe you want to sell your first drawing. And so that's going to change how you interpret the prompts. It's going to change how much time you put onto each prompt and maybe you're going to look for that one prompted really speaks to you and that's going to be the one you're focusing on. So setting a goal helps you to stay focused and it helps you to define success. So then on October 31st or November 1st, depending on when you finish your drawing, you're going to say, I succeeded because I met my goal. And that's what's going to really help you to feel that sense of accomplishment. Tip number 3, don't sweat it. So October is supposed to be fun. The goal of it is to learn and to grow. It's not to make a museum piece. It's not to sell $10 thousand worth of art or whatever it is, it's to be fun. So if you didn't do today's drawing, maybe you didn't have time, maybe the prompt just didn't make any sense to you. You weren't feeling it. That's okay. You can do things like the half marathon. That's typically where you do once every two days. Maybe a five K version if you want to continue their running analogy. So you do it on the weekends, maybe it's up to you. The point is to get drawing, not to get stressed. So if you're sitting there and you're saying, I can't handle a drawing every single day or maybe you're really detail oriented and it's taking you two or three hours and you just don't have the time for that. That's okay. Let it be one thing to talk about with October is some legal issues because you are using somebody else's intellectual property, specifically the name October. You have to be a little bit careful. What you do in general here with the rules are you can post to social media, anything you want. You can post stuff Facebook, you can post instagram, whatever it is. And you can use hashtags like interlobar, interlobar 2021 or whatever year it is, that's perfectly acceptable. You can sell your own work, do you? It's not like when you say you're doing a October, suddenly you can't sell your work. That doesn't make any sense. And you can use the word October as long as it's in the subtitle of your work. So for example, you cannot make a drawing called October because the term is copyrighted, but you can make a drawing called fish in October 2021 and that's perfectly acceptable. The main title would be fish and then the subtitle would be October 2021. In general, you have to be careful of a couple of things. The first one is you can't use the October logo without permission. So I know you can go to the website, you can get the October logo and so on. If you don't have permission to do so, you really shouldn't use it. Remember that's somebody else's work as well. So you shouldn't really be representing it or spreading it on your own. You can't use the word October as the main title of your work and you can't sell October merchandiser like getting Tolbert kit for example, without a partnership. So just be aware of these things. There are things that you just need to consider. And for the most of us, this is never really a problem. But when you start selling stuff and when you start using the term October, you just need to be a little bit respectful of the fact that it is someone else's intellectual property who started this. 4. Highlight Reel 2020: All right, Now I want to take you through is a highlight reel, I guess you might call it, of my 2020 and cobra experience. And I'm not going to show you all of them, but I want to show you how I put all these tips into practice for certain drugs. So my 2020 goals, I wanted to finish one drawing per day. That was my goal and I knew that I was just going to that was what I meant when I said I'm gonna doing Toby is one drawing predict. But I also wanted to test out as many new ways of using ink that I can't. So sometimes they didn't have time for that. It was just pen and ink with my sucrose Pigma Micron. Other times I was using brushes, I was using paint pans, I was using a bunch of other things. See what happens. I also had to respect my time for some of these. I only had a few minutes, maybe five minutes. And you can really see the ones where it had more time and less time. And I was actually doing another drawing, a challenge at that time. So when you take a look at some of these, they'll have little underneath headings and they'll be like number 47 is this one. And that's because I was doing another challenge for a 100 drawings and a 100 days and I figured I would merge that with my October so that I would have a couple of challenges to go for. Those were my goals. They've been up to your goals, but I want to show you how I use those goals to have a successful October so that you can do the same thing. This is day number one. It is called fish and this is the very first October drawing of 2020. And here you'll see I have a little bit of color and the color didn't really work out and that's okay. So I did a basic ink drawing and this was over pencil sketch, if you're wondering so I always typically will do a pencil sketch unless I really don't have time. And I used pink pens. This is a metallic ink paint pen. I just want to see what happens when I mix the two things together. I kinda like the pen and ink. I didn't really like the color, so I moved away from the color. And that was one of my goals is to learn different things about my art media. And I think that was very successful. On days where I tried to make a statement. I don't think that I really worked out for me, especially because I didn't have time for these ones. So you'll see this is the one on the left is for the prompt called armor. And at a time we were going through the pandemic. So I figured, well the mask is like armor, so I'm going to draw that and it didn't really work out. I don't think that these sorts of statements where my style and that helps me to learn things about my own art. And that's really winning Toby was about, is that I prefer representational art and I prefer things where you can sort of say, oh yeah, that's definitely the thing that it is. And maybe it's a single portrait of an animal or whatever it is. But making statements like these wasn't really my personal style. So I learned that through doing a October. Sometimes I took a lot of time to really get it right. I'm very proud of this one. This one was for the prompt called Music. And I thought, What does music mean to me? And it's things where we have singing or we have voice. And so I started thinking about, well, what has a voice. And then I came up with the idea of a parent night repair it. When you looking at the prompts for October, you don't have to interpret them literally, especially because some of them are very hard to draw. For example, the one called music. Well, how do you draw music? And so you can think of it, what it means to you, and that's what I did here. Here I took some new directions with my work as well. So this one on the left-hand side was an octopus. And what I really wanted to focus on with this one is a deep dark color and value contrast. And I think I was able to do that reasonably well. Now again, I didn't really have attended time for these. So what I did was I just focused on those one specific thing. So I was looking for so this one with the octopus was a real new direction for me is saying, okay, how do I fill in a large area with dark ink on the other side with road and I was trying to be as cartooning as I possibly could. And so I was taking my own October in two different directions because instead of being as representational as I could be with the time constraint I had. I was trying to say, well what is the minimal, the abstractor, they're cartoonists that I could have. So that's something you can think about as well when you're doing your October is take yourself into some new directions. So there's maybe you're a very representational, very realistic artist, tried to be more abstract. Maybe you're very abstract, tried to be more realistic. Maybe you just want to learn to draw with your pen and ink. And in these, I tested out new ways to use Incan. So this was a lot of fun. And I learned a lot about myself and a lot about how I use my medium. So on the left here we have a horse and this is a reverse ink drawing. So the white is acrylic paint that I flipped over and the black is ink that I brushed on and I brushed into my drawing rather than outlining and that sort of thing like I normally do for most of my pen and ink stuff. And so this is Incan brush and this is just a way of my saying, how do I use ink in a different way? I'm getting bored of pins, for example, this is for the prompt in 2020 called Storm. And I thought about what storming means in this horses running and storming and then sort of was a little bit of fun. So I tested out some new ways of using it. And on the right-hand side, we've already seen Mr. mountain goat here. And the mountain goat is a way for me to use. It depends. So I using Tolbert to really learn different ways of using my ink in my pens. And that's something I encourage you to do as well. So what did I learn? Well, they can't all be winter. Sometimes you have stuff that just doesn't really work out and that's okay. October is all about learning and having fun. So if you didn't learn and you didn't have fun, then you kinda missed the point. But if you learn something like for me where I learned, I don't really do statement aren't very well. It's not something I'm particularly interest in doing that. So be it. I felt that I really accomplished something and I probably should a stress less about completing every single day. So some of the drawings were really not great. I knew I didn't have time. I knew that I wasn't really thinking about it very hard. So for me it didn't really work out in my own style and true to my own artistic vision. 5. Class Project: Now we're going to talk about the class project and the class project for this one is already basically made for us. What do you think it is? Well, set your goals and go into it. I want you to set at least one thing Tilburg goal, get it ready to go and then go team, go and make some october arts shared on social media and make sure that people can see what you can do. That's your class project. I hope to see it shared below because I'm really curious to see what everyone come up with.