Sketchtober 2018 Review

Like last year, I decided to participate in Inktober in my own particular way. Meaning I used a pencil rather than a pen, because I need to erase stuff a lot.

I reused the same prompt idea as last year, my favorite games from each of the consoles I've owned. The difference being, rather than trying to do 35 sketches, I settled on 15. It gave me two days to get each sketch done, so my free time wasn't so entirely swallowed up by this as it was last year. 

The goal this year was to revisit the sketches last year that I wanted to turn out better. OK, almost all of them could have turned out better from my perspective, but I focused on the ones where I had some specific idea of what I wanted to do differently. The one exception was I did a picture for Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! this year, because I had an idea I wanted to try.

I consider the majority of this year's pieces an improvement. Not all - Thief: Deadly Shadows didn't come together at all how I hoped - and some of them would only be improvements because last year's piece was so poor.

I'm not gonna post them all, but here's three I was mostly happy with.

Day 1, back to Kirby's Adventure. Last year, I stuck with how the game actual makes you play the Metal Knight Level 6 boss fight, where you have to use the Sword ability. But the idea of Kirby instead unleashing his horrible voice with the Sing ability amused me. Kirby turned out well, the crooked sour notes turned out well, and I like Metal Knight's wide-eyed look. This was a very encouraging start to the whole thing.

Day 9, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Instead of last year's "everybody vs. Giga Bowser", I trimmed it down to Fox vs. Giga Bowser. Although Bowser looks less fierce than last year, I do like how the attempt at showing Fox's movement, from the Fox Illusion move to using the Blaster, turned out.

Day 12, God Hand. Gene looks closer to his game self, ditto Tiger Joe, although I'd change his posture if I did it over. Have him doubled over, a few more of the punches connecting with his face. Should have drawn the impacts of the fists like I did last year. Oh well, progress.

Movement, and how to represent it, ended up being a recurring theme in a lot of pictures. Characters teleporting, or moving fast, or just moving in general. And even when I wasn't necessarily happy with how the overall picture turned out, there were a lot of times I was at least happy with that part (The Dishonored picture for Day 14 comes to mind).

I was reading Greg Hatcher's post at Atomic Junkshop, on how he took part this year to show solidarity with his students, and I was kind of amused that we took almost entirely opposite approaches. Other than each of us using whatever art supplies were at hand, rather than going to find any fancy supplies. He set himself a hard 10-15 minute limit for his pictures. I think the fastest pictures I did took close to an hour.

I guess I don't think of these as practice sketches so much as things I really wanted to try drawing, so I could have them as finished pieces. Ideas in my head that need to look right on the page, or it doesn't do any good. I figured out this year, I'm really just using Inktober as an artificial deadline that I will actually respect. Since the arbitrary deadlines I otherwise give myself for other art projects don't seem to work. See also, I meant to have the Long Weekend in the Woods written and ready to start posting by the end of September, and it took three weeks into October.