Still Not Pre-Inking

Probably you know how hard it is to be almost at the starting line of a race waiting for the race to start. It’s not easy at all. In fact, you keep thinking about getting right up against the starting line but not going over it, and you keep thinking about how fast you have to go when you hear the start gun but also you have to make sure you don’t hear something else and make a mistake and think it’s the start gun and start too early. Also, you don’t want to freeze at the starting line with the start gun goes off because that’s just as upsetting as being too jackrabbit fast.

For me, that’s what Inktober is like. I know that when I wake up next Friday and it’s the first day of Inktober, that I can start drawing and inking and using the markers Josh is lending me for Inktober (he said if I need more because I used the ink up in some of them, maybe he’s going to have a few more he can give me to use).

Anyway, that means I can’t pre-ink anything because to my way of thinking that’s like jumping before the start gun goes off, and that would wreck Inktober for me (and probably Josh a little, too) because I’m challenging myself in this race. Nobody else is going to know if I pre-ink some art except for me and that’s the totally number one reason I am not pre-inking any art for Inktober. If I did, it would not be a fair race of me against my imagination and art ideas.

If I pre-inked art, I would wonder at the end of Inktober 2021 if I could have drawn and inked 31 drawings without jumping the gun. I would wonder if maybe I could have come up with better ideas and better ways to draw those ideas if I was almost at the end of a challenge day and still hadn’t come up with something yet. I would wonder if the word prompts beat me, or if I won 31 races 31 days in a row all by myself without pre-inking which I feel would be cheating for me.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to start telling people how to do Inktober. I’m me, Missy Barrett, and that’s how I’m doing Inktober.

I’m also not going to start telling people that pre-inking for Inktober is cheating. It is for me, but I’m not the boss of everybody. I’m the boss of me. Maybe for other people, their rules of what is cheating and what is not cheating are superly different than what my rules for me are.

I don’t even know if Jake Parker, the guy who came up with Inktober, says pre-inking is cheating or not cheating. I just know that for me, October 1 is the first day of Inktober and that means until October 1 (which is next Friday), I won’t be drawing or inking anything that I’m going to say is the artwork for any wordprompts on the Inktober 2021 word prompt list.

I am going to tell you that I’ve been doing a lot of art exercises with Josh since last year’s Inktober, and Josh says my art is looking even way more better than my art from last year (which is a great thing to find out because Josh is like the best ever drawer I know). Every week, Josh and me do art together, and the day before, he tells me what the word prompt he picked out is. Mostly they’ve been superly crazy easy words to make art for which is not exactly true about the Inktober word prompts for this year.

So next Friday, I’m going to start posting my Inktober art with a explanation of how I came up with my idea so it makes sense to you. And maybe you’ll add a link to your Inktober art in the comments section of my blog or on my Facebook page (which is where I am also going to be putting my art online).

Happy thinking, and remember that 2021 is more than just half of the name of the Inktober 2021 challenge: It’s the year we’re living in!!!

Thinking Is Not Pre-Inking

It’s two more weeks to go before it’s Inktober, and I’m kind of nervous this year because this year the word prompts feel more difficult than last year.  I almost have everything on my list filled in with ideas for what to draw but that doesn’t mean I can draw everything on my list. 

Some of what I wrote down is pretty hard to draw, and plus, ink and markers aren’t exactly what I’m best at doing art.  I do way better with colored pencils but Inktober is about ink (and markers have ink) and it’s not Pencil-tober, so I have to do what the rules say Inktoberites have to do.

I don’t know if Inktoberites is a real word, or even what people who do Inktober are called, but it’s what I think we should be called so that’s what I’m calling people who are part of Inktober:  Intertoberites.  I looked up what –ites means when you put it on the end of a word, and the dictionary says it’s a suffix of nouns (meaning it comes at the end of the noun) and it has to do with people that are part of a place or a tribe or a system, or something that is part of a mineral or a fossil or a chemical compound, and stuff like that.  Inktoberites is for people who are part of Inktober.

I guess if you do Inktober exactly the way Jake Parker came up with Inktober, you would be a Parkerian Inktoberite.  I should probably send Mr. Parker a email and ask him for sure so I don’t make trouble for him that he’s going to have to fix because of what I was guessing about on my blog.

Anyway, even if my stomach is going all superly rollercoastery every time I think about Inktober starting in just a few more days, I’m going to do Inktober again, and every single day of Inktober, I’m going to upload what I drew and explain how it ties in with the word prompt because sometimes maybe it’s going to be hard to figure out without me explaining things.  I know that because my big brother Josh looked at my list and he didn’t get how some of the ideas I jotted down tied in with the word prompt until I told him how they did, and then he got it.

Josh is not using a list.  He’s going to do Inktober the way he always does Inktober.  He’s going to draw whatever hits him on the day of the word prompt.  I did that last year and it was superly hard because sometimes nothing hit me, so I had to ask Josh or my other big brother, Aaron, for ideas.  They didn’t give me ideas though. They just talked to me until I got a idea so I could say I did Inktober, even if Josh helped co-draw a couple of drawings last year.

Be sure to tune in to my blog every single day next month because I think you’re going to like what you see.  That’s the fun of Inktober: Seeing what comes out of the word prompts every single day.

So remember:  Twenty twenty-one won’t just be two of the drawings I do for Inktober.  It’s the year we’ve been living in this year.