Inktober 2025 Drawings

Every year, the drawing event of Inktober has me looking forward to the fall as I time when I can re-commit to making creativity and specifically drawing part of my daily life again. This Inktober event was started by Jake Parker years ago, and has a pretty simple set of rules, following the themes set for each day in October. 'Mustache' was the kick-off this year for Day 1, which was a fun way to start...

(I don't think that I will post all of the images here, just a few of my favorites)

Day 3 was 'Crown', so I did not want to be too obvious, but also not get too complicated on an early day. I have these great little watercolor card that first came in handy for this, with a generous amount of India ink.

About at day 6 for 'Pierce' I remembered that simple shapes can allow you to make a complex subject quickly...

Really belated update...

It's hard to excuse such a long absence, but I don't mind saying that the rest of my life took priority, but that did not mean that I was not creating, and if for no other reason that catharsis, I will start a bit of backtracking, to pick up where I left off in 2021. I fee like there are quite a few of of who lost some time in the last few years, so many of you will understand. It was at the end of that summer that I picked up a slightly used XP-Pen tablet, as I thought it was worth trying one of the Wacom competitors, as Cintiqs are both hard to find, and very expensive here in Sweden. Though I will say that it took me a while to get into a rhythm with the way that I use the XP-Pen 22, overall I love it, and that love has resulted in me just drawing more.

For 'pure drawing' Sketchbook still remains my go-to application, though I was still experimenting at an early stage with Gravity Sketch, a VR drawing and modeling application. 

Mischief for Mac Desktop

Mischief is an app that I have been playing with lately; it's a very fast and

inexpensive drawingapplication that has an infinite canvas and is neither

vector or raster, but a hybrid. I have been using it for making annotations

on edits while working on UX and modeling concepts.

I've also started to use it on concepting; it's taking me some time to

appreciate its simplicity, mainly due to my reliance on Photoshop...

which is such a swiss army knife that you can get distracted or slowed

down by its features. 

Arguably you can use other apps for a similar purpose, but on a Cintiq,

 t’s very fluid for drawing; my hands seldom leave the screen/keys.

I have just started to experiment with using it for more robust drawing. 

I came across this excellent video of illustrator Ryan Dening on Mischief

which makes it pretty clear that it's not a shortcut to talent, but a way

to keep from getting bogged down in deep software. Mischief is fairly

simple, clean, and elegant. 

https://youtu.be/vHudyA4QdP8