Inktober 2019
Day 1 - Ring
Day 2 - Mindless
Day 3 - Bait
Day 4 - Freeze
Day 5 - Build
Day 6 - Husky
Day 7 - Enchanted
Day 8 - Frail
Day 9 - Swing
Day 10 - Pattern
Day 11 - Snow
Day 12 - Dragon
Day 13 - Ash
Day 14 - Overgrown
Day 15 - Legend
Day 16 - Wild
Day 17 - Ornament
Day 18 - Misfit
Day 19 - Sling
Day 20 - Tread
Day 21 - Treasure
Day 22 - Ghost
Day 23 - Ancient
Day 24 - Dizzy
Day 25 - Tasty
Day 26 - Dark
Day 27 - Coat
Day 28 - Ride
Day 29 - Injured
Day 30 - Catch
Day 31 - Ripe
So, Inktober is well and truly done. Time to tidy up my Instagram and make a big master post here with all the art and insights.
In true nerdy fashion along with the art will be some very light statistical analysis of my thoughts on the work, which I think is way more interesting that about 90% of the artworks.
So first up the good stuff, what are the stats? The numbers I looked at were likes and comments on Instagram and on an app designed for people who effectively do inktober all year round, sketch a day. On top of that I gave each piece a rating out of 10, where my favourite pieces for the month got a 10 and the worst got a 1. From there I could generate some graphs.
Interesting Insights
1. The trend lines for average social media engagement and my rating as the month progressed were inverse. My overall rating went up as the month went on, where social media engagement went down.
2. I got a comparable number of likes on both sketch a day and Instagram, but way more comments on sketch a day. Most of the comments on both were just like “good job!” but worth noting for people who love encouragement.
3. My best and worst days were at the start of the month, but my average was better at the end of the month. Leading to the trend line for my rating to slope up as the month progressed. The social media interaction sloped down, which is I think a combination of too many factors to just point at one. a. I think that sketch a day might of been featuring me as new artist. b. The works that went well or poorly tended to get exponentially more or less likes/comments where my rating was on a linear scale c. People gave up inktober and as a result were not engaging as much with other people’s content.
Overall
I think this is an interesting looking into the social media microcosm but I’m not really qualified or experienced enough to comment on what it all means. I would recommend that people who are looking at building their social media presence give something like this a shot for whatever their field is, and to actually run the numbers and have a think about it. While I find the stats interesting, that wasn’t really my focus. To be honest the main reason that I started was because Nathan wanted to do it and I was happy to do it with them as the family's visual artist (as opposed to musician, like the rest of my family) I think I succeeded in motivating them to complete the whole challenge. Looking back however I can see the pros and cons to practising art this way. I definitely haven’t produced art at that sort of volume since I was in high school, and a lot of it was really good for my skill level. I also produced some art beyond the scope of inktober (Mostly one piece that was a birthday gift, I may post it later). The biggest downside was that I wasn’t incentivised to create risky art. I had a tight deadline, and as much as I was okay with posting mistakes, I didn’t want to or couldn’t commit to something that would take hours of something so risky that I knew no matter what it would look bad, even in my own opinion. I have discovered that I really enjoy drawing and painting “assets” as in the little incidental features like paint brushes and flowers. I may channel this into a future project or take on another inktober style challenge but for flowers or potion bottles. Something with an already contained scope. I may also channel that into my enjoyment of pixel and ASCII/ANSI.