Sharpen your pen: Inktober 2017 has started!

The idea behind the original Inktober by Utah illustrator Jake Parker was a personal challenge: to create 31 drawings in 31 days.

Year after year this challenge has grown exponentially but the idea is still the same: having fun and practicing one’s drawing skills without overthinking about polishing and refining the drawing – that’s why it’s about ink drawings and not pencil drawings – even if pencil underdrawings are allowed.

All drawings should be tagged with the hashtags #inktober and #inktober2017 and posted online – Instagram is the favorite platform but other channels are also fine.

The “official” list of daily themes

Even some mainstream companies are involved, with Autodesk offering a free brush set for its SketchBook application.

Here are some other designers worth checking out during the Inktober challenge (and probably even afterwards).

• Arthur Martins, Exterior Lead Designer at Faraday Future
• Swaroop Roy, Senior Designer at Renault
• Vaughan Ling from Heavy Poly
• Luigi Memola, concept designer
• Benjamin Last, concept designer
• Olli Seppälä, Illustrator and designer
• Ian McQue (he’s not a transportation designer, but his work is stunning)

Even if you missed the first days, there is still time to take up this fun, inspiring challenge: after only 5 days there are already 1 million posts tagged #inktober2017.

Quantas landbus down for repairs #inktober #koala #drawing

Un post condiviso da Vaughan Ling (@heavypoly) in data: 3 Ott 2017 alle ore 21:40 PDT

If you need some information on the materials (pen, paper, etc.) needed for starting out, inktober.com has a list or, alternatively, you can watch the recent video by the great Scott Robertson – you can check his own daily ink drawings following his Instagram page.

If you want to share your own sketches or your favorite ones, you can leave a link in the comment section below.

(Source: Inktober, Instagram, Scott Robertson)