Full-time work, volunteer obligations, classes, and team commitments
can be a ton to juggle all at once; and practicing art on top of all of these commitments is difficult to say the least. Not impossible, but very difficult.
In the spirit of keeping this space real, the ugly truth is that Inktober 2018 was kind of a bust for me. However, I’m happy to announce that I beat my previous record of 5 days (impressive, I know).
This year, I lasted about half the month.
Going back to the root of the Inktober challenge, as mentioned by its bearer, Jake Parker:
You can do it daily, or go the half-marathon route and post every other day, or just do the 5K and post once a week. What ever you decide, just be consistent with it. Inktober is about growing and improving and forming positive habits, so the more you’re consistent the better.
In all honesty, I’ve never been consistent with anything in my life aside from brushing my teeth and other basic hygiene practices.
To those of you who also partially completed Inktober (whether you lasted 4 days, or 25), I bet it felt exhilarating and intrinsically rewarding when you were consistent.
. . . and quite the opposite when you broke the chain. But it’s alright because you had to get through your to-do lists and never-ending obligations and commitments, right?
Allow me to play devil’s advocate to myself and countless others who didn’t complete the challenge: maybe your problem is thinking that you can make everything on your list a priority, when this is genuinely not the case. There is such a thing as not having enough time and/or energy in a day.
However, if you’d like to place more focus on your art development, maybe its time to bring the practice into the forefront of your life—and correspondingly send some of the other activities on your list to the backseat.
It’s something to think about at least; because if art really was one of your top priorities, you’d likely be one of the glorious few who had completed the Inktober 2018 challenge in its entirety.
Here are all of my Inktober 2018 weeks 2 and 3 drawings (outside of those long gone after being drawn on scrap paper). I’ve yet to clean up the line work for many of these ink drawings, and will likely go back and touch them up.
How far did you manage to get in your Inktober 2018 journey? And what other upcoming challenges are you looking to tackle?
