My First Inktober: days 1 - 5

So this year I have decided to take part in Inktober. Inktober was created in 2009 by Jake Parker as a way to help develop your art skills. The general idea is to make an ink drawing every day and post the result online. I'm going to be using the official prompt list for inspiration.

Day 1 - "Swift"

With the swift prompt my first though was to just try and draw a swift

But I ended up not liking it and gave up before finishing the feet. In my second attempt I decided to go along the fantasy route so that I would get less frustrated about inaccuracies. So here is the final result, a swift-rat griffon.

Day 2 - "Divided"

For this prompt my first thought was a humanoid figure divided in half attempting to sew itself back together, but this turned out to be complicated and time consuming so I decided to do something different. I am quickly learning to try simpler drawings or to plan ahead with this challenge. I ended up trying out a silhouette style drawing with two deer divided by a canyon.

I'm not too happy with the composition as I was more focussed on getting the "divided" point across. I later decided to add colour.

Day 3 - "Poison"

For this day I wanted to do a poisonous animal, so I did some googling and found that there are poisonous birds! The Hooded Pitohui is a black and orange bird from New Guinea that has a toxin in its feathers, skin and other tissues. The idea of a poisonous bird is so interesting I decided to try and draw it.

Day 4 - "Underwater"

I really want an aquarium (more accurately, a bunch of aquariums) and one animal I'd love to keep a bunch of is the Red Cherry Shrimp. I think these guys are so colourful and cute so I decided that I would draw one for "underwater".

Day 5 - "long"

I wanted to keep drawing animals for this one, so what better than a snake. Ball pythons are super cute and conveniently packaged up and easier to draw! I decided I wanted some sort of background pattern and then it looked like a page from a colouring book so I decided to make it super colourful.

So far Inktober has been a lot of fun and I feel like I am already getting better at drawing. It's really fun to try and draw things I wouldn't normally draw and the time limit is very useful as I have a bad habit of starting things and not finishing them.