inktober 2020: day 1 to 5

hallo friends!

Welcome to the first of my Inktober posts! This is my first year participating and I am so excited to be finally doing this. I heard about this some time ago in the blogosphere and was finally pushed to do this when I found out my digital illustration professor offered extra credit for doing Inktober.

A little blurb about the materials I’m using:

• An old Strathmore Sketch spiral bound sketchbook I found
• A red Ticonderoga erasable pencil (This was introduced to me by the same professor and it has revolutionized my sketching game. I highly suggest trying it out, especially if you do a lot of digitizing and inking!)
• Prismacolor Premier Illustration Markers (These were given to me by an artsy friend and I just love the brush marker here – it’s so satisfyingly INKY.)
• Not shown: Pentel polymer erasers

My overall theme for this month is fairy tales/storybooks. I’ll explain how I try to portray this with each prompt!

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DAY 1: FISH

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When I was sketching this, I was convinced that there was a golden fish in a Cinderella tale of some kind, but I couldn’t find it online. I did find a old Russian fairy tale of the Golden Fish.

DAY 2: WISP

Will-o-wisp was to first thing that came to my mind! This interpretation was inspired by the will-o-wisps from the movie Brave and Nimue from the Wizards Netflix series.

DAY 3: BULKY

I interpreted “bulky” as “steadfast” and “grounded.” This elephant reminded me of Babar from those books I used to read as a child and maybe one of the elephants in Aladdin.

DAY 4: RADIO

I’m not quite sure how I got to Sleeping Beauty from the prompt “radio” but I thought it was a interesting concept to combine the dreaminess of princesses with the modern day idea of listening to the radio/music.

DAY 5: BLADE

Here’s how I got to Thumbelina: Blade, which leads to a blade of grass. Blade of grass is a phrase that appears in old fairy tales, especially those about actual fairies. Fairies. Thumbelina.

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I hope you enjoyed this peek into my Inktober sketches! I’d love to hear about your thoughts about Inktober! Have you done any drawing challenges like this? Do you have any advice for a first-timer?

Let me know in the comments!

live creatively!

Gaby