For the first time this year I participated in #inktober on instagram. I’ve never joined a drawing challenge like that before, and it was a lot of fun. As a brief intro, every October there is a prompt list released by the official Inktober (and many many other lists from other challenges as well) and the idea is to make 31 ink drawings, one for every day of the month. Now I’ll say right now that I completely ignored the prompt list and the credit for that goes to my friend, Clay, who participates every year but always puts a really interesting spin on it or does every drawing to a theme. So that’s sorta what I did. I drew 31 barns.
I started out by doing them in just in black ink (I had just gotten a new fountain pen) and then part way through the month I remembered that I had, and love, grey ink. Don’t ask me how this hadn’t occurred to me, but it hadn’t, but then it did, so it’s fine. So then I started adding that one extra tone! Lots of fun and experimentation. They are all up on my instagram, so I won’t bog down this post with 31 images.
An interesting aspect to me was all the ways that one can approach the same subject matter. A kind of drawing grammar begins to form itself as a particular visual language develops. For example, these three ways with trees:
It also should maybe be noted that being October, a lot of beautiful Fall foliage was in the middle of vanishing, so I drew a lot of leafless trees. But I draw barns all the time, so I had a good store of reference to go from when I didn’t have the chance to sketch en plein air. (Most of the plein air I was doing this past year were watercolours, so it’s a somewhat separate body of work)
Anyhow, that’s about it. Why not finish with a few non-ink drawings that didn’t make the final cut! You just might recognize a few of the barns if you’ve seen the whole Inktober collection. I have some favourite barns that I’ve revisited a couple times and probably will again.
