I decided to participate in #Inktober for the month of October, 2019. Many good illustrators do this, posting well-drawn images for every day of the month. I’m a terrible illustrator, but i wanted to see if i could draw things.
All drawings were done in Adobe Illustrator using a mouse to draw (a few were done using the trackpad). Most of them were drawn in the 15 or 20 minutes i had before i had to go to work, but even on days when i had time, i didn’t spend more than half an hour tops on any of them.
I did not use any reference materials—i.e. i wasn’t looking at anything to copy as i drew. All of these are from my (poor) memory of what something might sort of look like.
1.
I started simple.
2.
A little more complex. I started using Illustrator art brushes to make the lines more “hand drawn.”
3.
About the only thing i can draw with regularity is cartoony faces. I tried a full body.
4.
Color! It’s fall, so i went for the foliage look. This was colored with an Illustrator blend filling a shape behind the leaf.
5.
This is when i started to fill the sorry shapes that i drew using low-transparency art brush lines, layering them up with lots of strokes.
6.
More fills with brushes. Softer lines.
7.
This one was weird. I think i had some idea of commenting on body image. Tryied to draw realistic-ish profile.
8.
One of a couple drawings that aren’t all bad. I was getting used to the background fills with soft brushes.
I made this one into a T-shirt.
9.
Rough face. This is about when i spent some time creating my own art brushes of drawn lines in Illustrator.
10.
I tried to draw an entire thing, but i realized that i have no idea how to get proper perspective or shading. The shapes are filled with radial blends.
11.
I went back to something that i can draw—an alien face. I enhanced it with a masked fill of watercolor art brush lines and a lens flare on the background.
12.
I’d been trying to draw animals (including humans) and not having much luck, so i went for a flower. The fills on this are partly brush fills and watercolor art-brush fills.
13.
Back to people, but just stick figures.
14.
Eeeugh. This started out being a dragon or something but turned into a weird blob monster. I was trying to draw arms. I have no idea what the appendages on the bottom are.
15.
Halfway. I was driving and saw a guy walking along the road. I wanted to make this figure less of an actual shape and more of a stylized representation of a human, but i failed. Tried to get some perspective but mostly failed at that as well. This was the first one with solid fills and that used the entire artboard.
16.
Since i was failing at human figures, i went for a map today. I used overlayed lines of expanding width to create the edges of the landmasses into the sea areas, but the rest of the map was hand-drawn. I wanted to spend a little more time on this drawing roads and other things, but stopped.
17.
I really want to be able to draw dogs, but i really can’t. I tried, though.
18.
Finally some ultimate. This is actually a throwback to a disc design that i did in 2001 for women’s ultimate, although it wasn’t copied. I just used what i remembered as inspiration. This is the last image where i used the pre-made watercolor art brushes.
19.
I think that this is the best drawing of the month. I wanted to try some hatching to get a sense of shading. The fills were done with low-transparency basic brush fills, layed over each other. It came out in the PNG better than it looked at a larger size on the screen.
20.
One of my friends posted a picture of a beach on Facebook and i liked the way the birds looked. I tried to draw it so that it looked like the beach was receding into the distance, but that didn’t work.
21.
More cartoony faces. This one uses some “inner glow” effects to give the fills some depth. Weird dude, but i’d never drawn eyes like that—a style that i saw on someone else’s Inktober drawing.
22.
This did not come out as i was hoping, but once i got started on it, i plowed through to the end. Radial glow fill for the sun, art-brush strokes for the shape fills.
23.
Can i draw anatomy? No.
24.
Cartoons again. The fills on this one were block shapes, drawn with the line tool in Illustrator, not the brush or pencil tools. Also, this began a five-day streak of drawing by using the trackpad on my MacBook. I was at our family’s summer house and did not have the mouse hooked up.
25.
I wanted to try to stay in a cartoony style, but draw a whole body. Terrible. (drawn using trackpad.)
26.
I wanted to draw a spaceship. The white fill behind it has a rough art brush stroke with an outer glow on it. (Drawn using trackpad.)
I also made this one into a T-shirt.
27.
It was raining today. I went for simple. (Drawn using trackpad.)
28.
Odd cat-thing. (Drawn using trackpad.)
29.
Hadn’t drawn any landscapes yet. Back to drawing with a mouse.
30.
Halloween approches. For this one, i drew an art brush in the shape of a bone and used that bone-brush on the lines that i drew for the arms and legs.
31.
Ending on a cartoon face.
It was an interesting experiment, and it made it abundantly clear that my drawing skills can be bested by a semi-competent six-year-old. But i’m glad that i at least tried.