I've been a fan of Inktober since I first heard about it a few years ago as well as NaNoWriMo and other similar challenges). Last year an artist I work with did some phenomenal drawings for Inktober. I can't hold a candle to Jason's work (or most of the other artists that participate). However, I doodle and I enjoy drawing. And my wife showed me the Inktasy Challenge a night or two ago. So I'm going to try to do this, following the Inktasy challenge, but, hopefully, working in the official Inktober prompts.

The plan

Here's my plan. I love tabletop role playing games (RPGs), even though I'm not really able to play them much anymore. I also love the artwork that generally accompanies them. So, I'm going to take the prompts and challenges from Inktasy and Inktober and roll up a character, probably in the Rifts® RPG (it's the only one I really have references for now). Then I'll draw the character.

Once the character drawn, I'll scan it and clean it, then post it. It will go here (under the inktober2016 tag) and on deviantArt. And maybe (if I can spin it up soon enough) my Dimensional Anomaly site, which I've been dreaming up for years now.

The problems

Oh my, there's more than a few of these.

First, I've got a family of six. Every day when I get home it's kinda crazy. But I'm also trying to spend more time with each of the kids. Our second child is a budding artist. I'm going to see if he wants to do Inktober with me. But I still won't have lots of time.

Second, I'm going to stick with what I know and what I have. I'm not going to do much studying of techniques and such once it starts. And I'm going to stick with the non-artist (but, in my uninformed opinion still decent) pens that I already have: Bic Atlantis black in .5 mm and .7mm (.7mm is my current favorite), but possibly also the color .7mm Bic Atlantis pens I have. And I'm going to use a stack of card stock that I got a few years ago. So, average to poor tools and materials and mediocre skills.

Third, I'm going to restrict myself to just an hour of prep and an hour of artwork. Again, I don't have lots of time. I'll probably do the prep the night before (or at least some of it) as I sit in my daughter's room waiting for her to fall asleep. I hope to spend less than 30 minutes scanning and uploading.

Fourth, since I'm creating full blown RPG characters in a game system that's notorious for it's laborious character creation rules, I'll probably start with that tonight. And later characters will probably not get the full treatment. A quick creation with no fleshing out can take half an hour or more. Setting up the full details of a character can take several hours. Heck, if I didn't have the Game Master's Guide, it would take a couple hours just to find the right character classes. I'm drawing from roughly 30 books for character classes.

Fifth, I might have mentioned something about time restrictions. So while my goal is one a day, I won't be disappointed if I fall down to one every other or even every third day.

Sixth, I've got a bunch of other stuff I'd like to do, so I'm trying to wedge this in with everything else. But it's a welcome departure from my normal programming thing. Which makes it not so much of a problem, I guess.

Finally, I'm only mediocre at drawing (have I mentoned that?). This won't be the best artwork in the world. But the goal is to improve and to enjoy myself...so hopefully I will. And maybe someone will decide they like something about my work :)

The wrap up

I'm going to do another post that details the one line descriptions of what I'll be drawing. But that's for another day. And all my Inktober artwork and comments on it will be grouped under the inktober2016 tag.

If you're doing Inktober, congratulations and good luck! If you're just looking at my stuff, please, check out the work from other people. It will likely be a welcome releif from mine ;-)