inktober52 2024
These are my weekly lllustrations for Inktober52 in 2024I completed the first 13 weekly illustrations but stopped as I had other projects that I wanted to explore. Inktober 52 was such a great way to get back into a regular practice of drawing and I achieved the challenge of completing the whole of 2023 and more!
WEEK 1: I think it is a stretch but it is possible that wooly mammoths were around at the time Stonehenge was built, but I’m not an anthropological historian so who knows? (probably an anthropological historian!)
WEEK 2: SLICE ‘Slice of Life’ is a depiction of mundane experiences in art and theatre entertainment. So, my quite literal rendering of ‘slice of life’ seems to fit with that: it’s arbitrary, there is no narrative or meaning and definitly with an open ending.
WEEK 3: LEGO The Princess Tower at Wallingford Castle could actually be the first known example of a lego character. It is possible that the remaining part of the Medieval Lego character is still underground, like the full figures of the Moai Statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are buried.
WEEK 4: SPLASH The frog has been disturbed from its rest in the waterlily flower, but who dropped the sugar cubes into its flowery cup?
WEEK 5: FISH My favourite fish is the Grayling: discovered whilst watching the UK TV series ‘Gone Fishing’ with Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse. It has a large, red dorsal fin, a pewter body with small hexagonal scales.
WEEK 6: COFFEE I went for a flat white (my favourite style of coffee drink) with my friend Jill. It was St Valentine’s Day so the heart motif in the milky foam was perfect.
CAT: 7 The cat on the left is called Selby, the favourite childhood toy of my daughter. I imagine that he has a spirit cat, also called Selby. It looks real, but there is something not quite normal about that big ginger tom.
WEEK 8: ASTRONAUT/PASTRONAUT This prompt flummoxed me for a bit. All I could think of was really obvious ones, but after a lot of doodling and thinking I came up with this which was fun to draw. I added some colour in the digital mix which made it explode!
WEEK 9: BALLOON I chose to revisit the topiary balloon I drew for the prompt RISE in Inktober 2023. I added some stone trees and cloud typography for the dream like feel in the castle series I did back then.
WEEK 10: FLIGHT Let your words take flight. Just a nice simple one this week. I used a Hinkswells & co. # 2778 nib for the swooshy script text, and the rest is just what it is, a bird in flight.
WEEK 11: RACCOON The raccoon's fur is great for scratchy line drawing. I used 0.5 and 0.35 Rotring pens for this drawing. The constellation featured in the night sky for this nocturnal animal, is Canis Minor, with the main star ‘Procyon’ which is the Genus name for the raccoon.
WEEK 12: SPRING Daffodils mean Spring to me, I picked this one from my garden.
13. SAMURAI Drawn from reference taken on a visit to the Pitt River Museum, Oxford.