Inktober is a thing where anyone interested attempts to make an ink drawing every day of October, or at least a once a week, or anything else in line with the main goal of making good habits. I’m more of the pixeling persuasion, so this year I did indeed produce an assortment of monochromatic pixels for all 31 days, using the Official set of prompts. Observe, should you desire. You can, or should be able to, click on them to embiggen.

Some are good, some are bad. One is bloody adorable (the fairy-wren, of course). Some are quick and dirty and some took too much time. Some prompts sucked and some were useful. In fact, if you want to draw spurious connections of your own, I’ve even put information on all of them into a handy CSV.

For instance, there seems to be an interesting correlation between orientation and background colour:

Quick explainer on some of the less usefully-named columns:

• Usefulness: how well the prompt succeeded at prompting. If I was racking my brain throughout the day, it’s bad.
• Presence: the extent to which the thing described by the prompt exists in the picture to begin with. There’s no actual fairy in a fairy-wren, so it gets low presence.
• Prominence: how apparent the thing described by the prompt (even if tenuously à la “Fairy”) is in the image as a whole.
• Joke: is the essence of the image in itself a joke? For instance, a bat with a bat is a joke.
• Time: the editing time stored in the Krita file. This measures seconds, and I’m pretty sure it only counts time something is actually happening and not just having the file open. And also includes time up to actually saving something in the first place.

Of course these are all subjective measures. Most of them are.

Somewhat surprising I managed to find the time for all of this because I’m not so certain that’ll be the case next year. Even so I probably wouldn’t do the inking style in future – that’s not how I usually draw so it’d be nice to at least get practice doing the things I normally would instead. It was interesting that towards the beginning I’d sketch out the main features on a separate layer first and then do the thing proper, whereas after the first few days I’d use one layer from start to finish, sketching out lines directly in the ink-style brushes rather than a light pencil-type one.

In all it was interesting but I’ll be taking a bit of a break from drawing for a while (as if to imply I wouldn’t be doing other things regardless).