Category: Slice of Life

こんばんは。How’s it going?

Well, I’m a few days late to post this, but I did finish my first Inktober! I completed it a day late but I’m happy that I was able to finish 31 drawings on the iPad. I have to say that Inktober was beneficial to my drawing process in a few ways, but I’m not really organized in my thoughts about it so forgive me if I just ramble on a bit.

First, I learned how to draw from reference photos much better. Just getting used to using the “Split View” on the iPad took a bit of effort but once I mastered that, drawing while referencing a photo was a pleasure!

I mainly focused on portraits, but I also did a few full-body poses. These were a lot of fun and I found myself focusing on proportion, angles, lines, and shapes. It was almost like magic how you could just draw shapes, and try to get the sizes and positions correct, and then you “step back” and look at the drawing as a whole and it would look like a real person! I am especially pleased with how this drawing turned out:

Another thing that Inktober taught me about myself is that I will be fine with my drawing as long as I just get started and then work things through. Too many times in the past, I would not even start on a drawing because I had the thought already in my mind that the finished piece wouldn’t be good. Talk about a negative way of thinking! But Inktober forced me to just get started each day, with the expectation that I just needed to commit to 10 minutes. Of course, I would get into the process so much that I’d spend way longer than 10 minutes, and after a few days of Inktober, I broke free of my negativity on starting a new drawing. I hope this major victory of mine endures.

One other thing I’ve found is that if a drawing doesn’t seem right to me, I can just keep working it, and eventually it will get better. I just need to put in the work and effort. Not once did a drawing get worse… and I can credit a lot of that to the digital drawing experience. If I was working with ink on paper, I’d get frustrated with the wasted materials, or erasing so much and leaving so many errors on the paper. On the iPad, I realize that I don’t have that problem, and enjoy working through several revisions and trying different things since erasing or undo-ing is painless. I love it!

Anyways, I’m sure there are a few more things I learned about my creative process during this Inktober, but I’ll just end this post now. But I’m excited to continue drawing on the iPad and see where the process takes me!

If you’d like to see all my Inktober 2019 sketches (many with a Procreate timelapse movie), you can check out my barron.sketches Instagram account. Click here to see Day 1.

またね～

p.s. I have to mention that I no longer fear drawing hands! I can actually make them look decent, and not like claws. Yay! 😄