2013. For awhile our small town had a full-sized multi-room warehouse art store. And I compulsively bought some things, even though I am not an “artist”.
I bought a sketchbook. I bought black india ink and nibs and a nib-holder. I bought a waterbrush.
I found out how hard it is to use those nibs, even just to make rough outlines of shapes. This was before I had leveled up my fountain pen game; I was still just using my basic Parker Vectors with their plain medium nibs for regular handwriting purposes.
This is the first complete water-painty sketchy thing I attempted:
I was just fooling around trying to get the hang of the tools and didn’t expect it to materialize into an actual picture of anything.
Going into that uninhibited state of expectation-less discovery was fun, meditative, and therapeutic. It’s like entering a trance.
An art trance. An ink trance. Some kind of ESP automatic-writing psychic porthole where the subconscious pulls things out of a magic viscera box documenting waking-dreams on paper.
Posting this now on the last day of September having pretty much resigned myself to NOT attempting Inktober. It is too much to commit to doing anything daily that requires a bunch of tools and basically sucking at it when I am not sure I’ll even be able to consistently be at home (a lot of family cancer and other health challenges going on this year).
Obviously I am *not* truly resigned to giving up on Inktober before it even starts, though. The key is to keep it simple. VERY simple. And not care about “sucking” … not attempt to do anything by anyone else’s standards.
It can just be practice. It can just be discovery. It can just be pleasure.
One of the ways I can keep it simple is by limiting it to five minutes. But maybe that is counterproductive, trying to race through something I want to be able to submit to.
Another way to keep it manageable is just to play with ONE different ink every day. Attempt nothing fancier than that. Don’t “draw” anything. Just inky color fun. I’m sure I have thirty-one different inks here, mostly in sample sizes.
Overall I’m having a pretty hard time.
Inktober could be really good for me, or really bad for me. Or maybe it could just be something to help add just enough new inconsequential structure to help me get through the next thirty-one days of who-knows-what-else-will-go-wrong.
