The Importance of Projects and Having the Right Motivation
My experience with the Inktober challenge in 2022
(Originally posted on my discontinued Medium blog)
This year I managed to finish Inktober (a 31-day drawing challenge) for the first time, since I tried it a couple of times in previous years, but never got to the end.
With highs and lows, I didn't miss a single day, and I'm very proud of holding now in my hands my sketchbook with the 31 drawings in it.
In this post, I share insights about what I did differently this year that set me up for success, and also my learnings from the challenge.
The Inktober Challenge
If you never heard about it, Inktober originally started as a challenge where the main goal is to draw and post on Instagram one ink drawing a day, during the month of October — from which its name comes. Each day will have a prompt word that works as a theme.
Although most artists still stick to doing pure ink drawings, nowadays it goes beyond that and you can find many people participating in it using different kinds of mediums. What really matters is the challenge of showing up every day and doing some art.
I'm sure there's nothing much innovative about it being a "whole-month" challenge, but I believe it was one of the first being art-themed — or at least the first one to become so popular in the art community.
My Story With Inktober
The first time I tried this challenge was back in 2017, and I only made it to day 8. It was still a win because it meant getting back to drawing after a long period away from art, probably since my late teenage years.
Next year, in 2018, I tried it again. I made it to day 11.
In both years, I believe I quit mostly due to choosing drawings that were too complex for my skills and the time I had available each day. There was also no planning involved: I would sit at the end of the day, after work, have to come up with the idea, do the pencil sketch, and then the inking. Eventually, I didn't manage to keep up and ended up quitting.
Another aspect of it, I figure, is what was driving me to take on the challenge in each of those years. I believe there was a lot of comparing my work with other great artists participating in the challenge, which certainly contributed to demotivating me. There wasn’t a proper motivation in place to keep me going—more on that ahead in this post.
Since quitting in 2018 I haven't tried the Inktober challenge again. Until this year.
Treating the Challenge as a Project
This year, when I decided again to take on the challenge, I combined a few things that I believe made all the difference for me to succeed:
I bought a new sketchbook, dedicated solely to this challenge. I kept in mind the desire of having its pages filled by the end of the month.
I defined one clear and main goal: not miss a single day. As obvious as it sounds, this was important for me to prioritize getting a drawing done over getting it perfect, for instance.
I worked on leveling up my skills beforehand, with some dedicated practice to improve my inking technique and familiarity with the different materials.
Although I really would have liked to draw things from my own imagination, I kept it simple and relied on photo references instead, according to the prompt word for each day.
Instead of fighting each day only when it came, I planned and prepared in advance: for each prompt, I searched for the references and made a pencil sketch beforehand. In the years before, I would have thought of that as cheating, but then I understood that was silly of me — not only many other great artists do that, but doing it has nothing to do with the main goal, which is showing up every day.
I arranged a dedicated space for me to draw every day, which would allow me to just sit and start drawing. Before that, I was using the same desk where I spend my whole day for my daily job. At the end of the day, I would need to change my working space into my art space. Based on the learnings from Atomic Habits, the idea was to remove every possible point of friction that could make it harder for me to stick to the habit I was trying to establish — in this case, drawing every single day. I was already planning that dedicated space for doing art in general, so it REALLY did help me for doing Inktober.
Frequently enough, when we try to improve on some specific skill, we start doing things without a plan, or clear goals in mind. Doing it like that, makes it too easy to get ourselves lost in the middle of the process and end up quitting the topic altogether. Sometimes we even forget the actual reason why we started doing it, so there's no point to keep going either.
Treating Inkober like a project, planning and preparing for it, made all the difference for me to set myself up for success: a project has a starting and ending date, clear and well-defined scope, and also specific goals.
The Importance of Having the Proper Motivation
Although it could have been the case, I didn’t decide out of the blue to take on the challenge again this year. There was a context around it.
In the second half of 2021, I got back to doing art with more frequency, which was when I really fell in love with charcoal and pencil drawings. However, I really do love every art medium, so I wanted to level up my skills beyond charcoal and pencil. That led me to sign up for this online platform, which offers classes on several art mediums (thevirtualinstructor.com, which does not sponsor me, but I can recommend it if you are a beginner and want to explore art without a big investment, and still good enough guidance).
One of the tracks on that platform is precisely on ink drawing, so I watched some classes and got into practice based on the reference material it offers. I was really enjoying being back to inking, and I was seeing great improvement in my drawings, which boosted my morale. That was then a key factor for me to try out Inktober again, as a way to go the extra mile.
I did not take on Intkober again for the sake of doing it, or even for the sake of posting on Instagram and gaining likes—although i's surely great and very motivating to have that. Even more important than treating it like a project, I figure that the key difference this time was the fact that I already had an intrinsic motivation to improve my skills in different art mediums, inking included, which is a personal-fulfilling goal. Inktober came more as a by-product of that, a plus. I was already doing ink drawings more frequently, so I "just" added the extra goal of doing it daily, and posting it for the challenge.
The Learnings
Besides the main goal of completing the challenge, I was expecting more than just that. I was looking forward to learning something from doing it. I was not sure, however, what exactly I would learn with it.
First of those learnings: I can draw every day. Yes, that's one learning. Regardless of how tired or "not in the mood" I was, I managed to pull off a drawing a day for a whole month, which is something I have never done before — except maybe when I was a kid? 🤔.
There was this one day in specific when I was especially tired. Also, not only I haven't a sketch prepared, I was really bored by the prompt word, so I didn't even have a reference chosen yet. I had all the reasons to miss that day. I took a shower, ate something, and finally decided to sit and at least start. It turns out that drawing became one of my favorites of the month.
Consciously or not, here I applied one learning from (again) Atomic Habits: starting is the hardest part of it; once I started, I got into the flow and it was easier to continue than to quit and break my almost 20-day streak.
Second: using projects to learn or improve skills works wonders. In the previous section I have already explained the importance of treating this like a project, so here I just want to acknowledge the fact that it worked really well, which means I want to do it more often. I can create my own projects—with clear scope, goals, and timeline—in order to accelerate my learning journey.
Third: I definitely improved my inking skills. Most of the learning came from the practice as preparation for the challenge than from the drawings I did in the challenge itself. Before that preparation, I would not have been able to achieve the same results I have gotten.
Truth be told, I actually think the majority of the drawings were not as good as the ones I did before the challenge. However, that's an unfair comparison. I did produce better stuff before, but within a time span of two or three days each. During the challenge, for most of the days, I had at most 3 hours to finish them.
I will stay at those three main learnings, which are more than enough for me. For the investment I made, those rewards were way worth it.
What Could Have Gone Better
Put short, there isn't much that could have gone better, compared to my expectations for the challenge, and given the level of preparation I had.
However, one thing I intended to do but ended up not doing, was to try out different styles and techniques in different drawings. There were a couple of days only when I went a bit out of my comfort zone, but I ended up either failing miserably or falling back to my usual (and still basic) techniques.
My assessment here is that the time constraint made me fear trying new things, under the risk of messing up big with the drawing and then not have time to start again, which could lead to me to not want to post my failure, resulting in a missed day.
However, I got to see the artwork from many amazing artists throughout the whole month, in many different styles and techniques. I feel inspired enough to go and try to emulate them going forward, and with that expand my skillset.
What Comes After?
Post-Inktober, I'm already not drawing every day anymore. I needed a break from it: not from drawing at all, but from the commitment to finish something each and every day. I also wanted to write this post, and maybe even prepare a video to go through and comment each drawing, and all that took my whole free time.
I do want, however, to keep practicing and honing my inking skills, because this is one of the mediums that I most love, but at the same time still have a lot to learn about.
As mentioned before, one way of keep learning is by having projects. In the upcoming weeks I intend to redraw some of the prompts that I most felt inspired about, where I know I can do a better job with the proper time and patience. Next year, I also plan to take on the Intkober52 challenge: one drawing a week, for a whole year. It gives me a weekly deadline, which is a way softer commitment than the daily challenge, but still a commitment.
If you followed me during Inktober, I'm really thankful for that. If not, I invite you to check my drawings on my Instagram profile (the first day, for reference). Follow me there and you'll hopefully see some continued progress there.
Thanks for reading.