Inktober Monsters Unleashed and Unafraid

We're just halfway through October, and I thought it high time to post about my #Inktober2019 adventure so far.

It took me a while to land on a theme for this year. Last year I started something fun, creating characters for a game my honey is developing, Cocoa Rush. I didn't get through the whole month since work demands (and perhaps some of my own fear) took over. Here's a few highlights.

Inktober 2018 Cocoa Rush Characters

Same with 2017, Georgia and her Dragon traveling the world. I created this using markers and ink in my sketchbook.

Inktober 2017 Around the World with Georgia and Her Dragon

However, 2016 I drew dragons, and I did every day minus a couple weekends off. Many of them have gone on to be colored. Here's a few highlights.

Inktober 2016 Dragons Highlights

So, this year I decided to join in the fun with monsters, and I'm trying to keep it simple so I will stick with it. I waffled on a few different ideas, but it all came down to unleashing the monsters and being unafraid.

Inktober 2019 prep

I took this last weekend off, so I'm now I'm a bit behind but I do have the sketches ready for days 12, 13, and 14. Here are the drawings for days 1 through 11 with two varieties for Bait.

Inktober 2019 Monsters, 1 - 11

Here There Be Monsters

Inktober 2019 Monster, Day 1 Ring sketches

I'm sketching in a sketchbook with a ball point pen, basically a page a day. Some days I sketch more, some less -- some of the prompts have produced sketches that worked for several days of inking.

Inktober 2019 Monster sketches, Day 3 Bait

Since the rules of the challenge have opened to it being acceptable to ink digitally, and since Adobe Fresco just came out, I thought I'd give it a go on my trusty iPadpro and do all my inking for #Inktober with it. This has given me a chance to practice and play with the new program every day and get to know how it works. I was hesitant to like it since I'm a huge fan of Procreate, and I have to admit, I'm really enjoying it. There's a lot I can't do with it, but for inking, it's tops!

More about Adobe Fresco

I've been a huge proponent of Procreate -- and I'm still painting with that program -- but I recently tried to do some black lining in that program and transfer to my computer in Photoshop, and the lines and inking were a mess. So, I'm thrilled with the new Adobe Fresco vector line -- can't adjust it in Adobe Fresco (yet?) but you can when transfer to computer and open each vector layer in Illustrator and adjust the paths. The pens are so much fun to use, that I'm not backing away from black lining now. I use mostly the vector brushes to get clean black lines of the characters, and then I splatter brush value in the background. I still need to play more with the style, pushing and pulling the values and line width to make the subject matter stand out more, but I'm really digging this style and look. The big bonus is I'm having fun with it and it's a valid way to do solid and clean black lines that can adjust and resize without getting messed up -- so client work coming up with a comic book style will not suffer. Yay!

Monster thoughts

Now, let's take the esoteric bent on my title. There are monsters lurking every day to tell me to stop doing this: I'm wasting my time, I didn't get very many likes on this or that social media, maybe I should stop and do something else. I suck. This style sucks... and so on. But... I may be a few days behind, but I'm off to slay those monsters for the rest of the month. Follow my journey on my various social media platforms daily (buttons at the top). I'll post more here soon.

Slay those monsters and keep going.

#Inktober, #Inktober2019 #InktoberMonsters, #TVWMonsters #AdobeFresco