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Today would’ve been my mother’s 80th birthday had she not died in February. (She lost her 12-year battle with multiple sclerosis.) Since I’ll never get the chance to celebrate such a milestone with her, I’ll just post this drawing instead.
This was a drawing I originally did for Inktober back in 2017. I drew a birthday cake with Elvis Presley from his Jailhouse Rock days. (My mother was a teenager when Elvis first hit it big and she had remained an Elvis fan for the rest of her life.) I digitized this drawing, printed it out, then included it with her birthday card that I sent to her that year. (I sent it a few days late because I was pretty disorganized in my private life that year.) She later called me thanking me for that illustration. She seemed to appreciate it.
So my mother is gone but, in a perverse way, she literally died at the right time for her. The Coronavirus pandemic arrived just a few weeks after her funeral. Had she lived a while longer, there would’ve been a very strong chance that she would have caught it due to her weakened immune system from MS. It would’ve been a far more hellish death complete with a ventilator.
As it was, my mother died in the middle of the night while she was sleeping. My cousin had come into her room to say hello to her before she headed off to work and found her dead. As for me, I was asleep in my own bed just 30 miles away. I didn’t learn about her death until mid-morning after I woke up. So I wasn’t by her bedside when she passed but I’m not bitter or angry about it. I knew for years that she was going to die because MS has no cure. I thought I was mentally prepared for her death only to learn that you’re never 100% fully prepared for that person’s death no matter how much of an advance notice you get.
Even though it’s sad that she didn’t live to see her 80th birthday it was probably just as well that she died before that birthday. Given how much she had physically declined over the last five years or so, I don’t think it would’ve been much of a celebration for her because she would’ve been way too weak and exhausted to enjoy any kind of the festivities that are usually held for such a momentous milestone birthday.
Happy birthday and rest in peace, Mom.
I decided not to take part in Inktober this year for three reasons: 1) I’m currently involved in a job program that is taking a huge amount of my time plus I’m currently dong some major reorganizing of my house, which means that I have less time to take part in Inktober on a daily basis. 2) I have been so burned out on the daily time commitment to Inktober where I have to come up with something to draw, get that drawing done by the end of the day, photograph it, upload it to all of my social media accounts and this blog, then repeat the entire process the next day and every day until Halloween. 3) There have been enough major controversies with Inktober and its founder, Jake Parker, that I’m pretty turned off from participating.
For the previous three years I participated in Inktober. The first year was in 2017. That year I basically drew whatever I wanted and I only used the official Inktober prompt list if I was stuck on what to draw that day. At the end of the month I made this video featuring the drawings I did that month.
When Inktober 2018 came around I decided to challenge myself by limiting myself to drawing what was on the official Inktober prompt list for that year. I have to admit that some of the words on that list really stumped me (such as “double”) but I did the best that I could with it. Here’s a video of all of the drawings I did that year.
When I was in the middle of doing Inktober 2018 I discovered an Instagram account called inktoberprompts where I found out that other people have done their own prompt lists and shared them online so Inktober participants aren’t stuck with using just the official prompt list. By that point I had committed to sticking with the official prompt list so I didn’t use any of the alternative prompt lists.
For Inktober 2019 I thought about using one of those alternative prompt lists but I had the same problem with those lists as I did with the official list where some days I would have no problems with doing a drawing based on the word of the day but other days would leave me stumped as to what to draw. I came up with this innovative idea where I would take 31 different prompt lists and do one drawing from each one each day.
The good thing with this method was that I had no problem with coming up with a drawing each day. Unfortunately the disadvantages of this method outnumber the one advantage. Finding 31 different prompt lists with 31 different words required a lot of preparation, including making sure that I didn’t end up drawing the same thing twice. There were times when I had 20 potential words on 20 different lists circled for—let’s say—October 15 and I had to make up my mind as to which of the 20 words I wanted to work on for October 15 and that was definitely time-consuming. Doing this method also required extensive note-taking because each prompt list creator asked anyone using that list to please tag that person and use appropriate hashtags, which is fair enough since each prompt list creator did go through the effort of coming up with the list in the first place. It just provided more work for me because I had to keep detailed notes so I could provide the proper credits.
Another disadvantage is that many of the creators of these alternative prompt lists didn’t upload their lists at the same time. There were days when I didn’t find any new lists for me to consider. I found that many of these prompt list creators didn’t upload their lists until late September. (In fact, I saw some prompt lists that didn’t get uploaded to Instagram until a day or two before October 1.) By mid-September I decided to get going on scheduling what prompt lists I would use on what day so I would have something to draw by the time Inktober began.
Some of the alternative list creators have responded positively to the fact that I did a drawing based on their lists but many of them didn’t seem to notice what I did.
In any case I managed to successfully completed Inktober even though I was completely burned out by the end of the month. Here’s the video of all of the drawings I did that year.
Working on this blog post is about as close as I’ll get to taking part in Inktober 2020 but I’m okay with that decision.
For the past three years I’ve participated in Inktober, the annual art challenge where every day from October 1-31 you are expected to make one new ink drawing per day then share it online while using the hashtags #inktober and #inktober2020 (or whatever year you are participating in Inktober).
For this year I was sitting on the fence as to whether I even want to take part in Inktober again. I still have memories of burning out on doing one new ink drawing per day for an entire month. I also felt frustrated by the fact that my Inktober drawings haven’t received much attention in the three years I’ve participated and it’s due in large part to having so many artists also take part. I feel like my drawings have gotten lost in the shuffle of so many other Inktober drawings.
Also, after succeeding in completing one new drawing each day during the 31 days of Inktober for the last three years in a row, I no longer feel the need to prove to myself that I can do something like this. I now know that I capable of creating and finishing one new drawing per day for one month if I put my mind to it. I just don’t need to prove it to myself year after year. I also want to go back to the pre-Inktober days when I used to actually enjoy the Halloween season and working on Inktober had definitely cut into that.
Of course with the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, I seriously doubt that there will be any kind of large-scale Halloween celebrations this year. I’ve heard parents online expressing their reluctance to send their children out trick or treating because of fears they could catch that virus. Practically all of the fall and Halloween festivals, parties, and other kinds of events in my area have been cancelled due to the pandemic.
I think the pandemic, along with the death of my mother back in February, have definitely opened my eyes to the realization that there are times when I should just sit back, savor the quiet moments, and just enjoy the little things in life—like the changing fall leaves and the arrival of the milder weather where the outdoors are less hot and humid. I’m starting to think that life is too precious to spend time sweating over making one new drawing every day for one month just to satisfy some online event where I haven’t even gotten recognition for my past work.
At one point I had thought about taking part in Inktober again but cutting back on the number of drawings. Instead of churning out one new drawing every day, I thought about doing one new drawing each week during Inktober. The big issue is the fact that, unlike the last three years, I have less free time this year. I was accepted into a program that’s designed to get adults into jobs faster and it’s designed to prevent long-term unemployment and underemployment. I’m attending online workshops via Zoom four days a week plus there are additional readings and activities that I’m supposed to be working on. I’m not even sure if I have the time necessary to participate in Inktober even on a weekly basis.
Then there are the actions of Inktober’s founder, Jake Parker, who have alienated the artist community in general. Jake Parker originally created Inktober as an online artist community event where people would create and share their art. In time Inktober has become a big name as it has attracted more and more artists from around the world.
First there was the growing corporate sponsorship to the point where there are now official Inktober drawing supplies, which drew complaints from more cash-poor artists who complained online about how they couldn’t afford to purchase these higher-end official drawing supplies. In the past I didn’t let the lack of funds stop me from participating in Inktober and I even made a video last year showing how a cash-strapped artist could still participate in Inktober by using cheaper art supplies instead of buying the official Inktober ones.
But then Jake Parker decided to file a trademark on the Inktober name, which really pissed off the participants who have long assumed that they were involved in a non-commercial online community art event. I’ve read complaints online that Jake Parker had used that trademark to go after individual artists who decided to sell the work they’ve generated during Inktober online (at places like Etsy and eBay) if they use the word “Inktober” while selling it.
Jake Parker has also attacked artists who decided to participate in Inktober by drawing digital sketches using various computer graphics programs instead of the traditional ink and paper. He strongly feels that one can only take part in Inktober by using ink on paper. (He only allows pencil for underdrawings but they have to be finished in ink.) He has even stated that he strongly prefers black ink only although I have used ink in other colors in my Inktober drawings.
I’ve also read accusations on Twitter that Jake Parker had a series of web courses where he allegedly pulled examples from Pinterest without crediting the original artists.
But then Jake Parker decides to come out with a book of his own titled Inktober All Year Long. Naturally the artist community is bristling at the title because it dredges up memories of the fact that Parker trademarked the name Inktober and had gone after any artists who were selling their Inktober work using the Inktober name.
The book hasn’t been released yet but one artist named Alphonso Dunn had downloaded an excerpt of that book of that book from Amazon and noticed some similarities between Parker’s book and Dunn’s own book called Pen & Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide. He became suspicious but, since the book hasn’t been released yet, he can’t look through the book to see how similar it is to his own book. It was when Jake Parker had gotten an advanced copy of his book and he posted a short video on Instagram of himself quickly flipping through his book that Dunn decided to make a screencast video of Parker’s Instagram video then slowed down the video enough so Dunn could get at least a superficial peek at what is in the book. He found numerous similarities to his book throughout Parker’s book. Dunn made this YouTube video where he outlines his accusation that Parker had plagiarized parts of Dunn’s book.
I understand where Dunn is coming from, especially where he speaks about how much work it is to write a book because I’ve written a book myself. I can only imagine the emotions that Dunn felt when he saw the similarities between his book and Parker’s book.
But, then again, I have to remember that Parker’s book hasn’t been released yet. Dunn’s accusation is based mainly on a short excerpt from that book and an Instagram video. I’ve heard the defense that, naturally, there are similarities between the two books because there are only so many different ways that one can teach art. But the bottom line is that Dunn has made a pretty convincing case for his contention that Parker had plagiarized portions of his book. Anyway, to be fair, here are two other videos about the controversy that you may want to take a look at.
In any case there have already been fallout from this controversy. DeviantArt was going to host the 2020 Inktober Awards but it has decided to withdraw entirely from that event.
Then there is also the racial aspect as well. Parker is white while Dunn is black. With the brutal police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the more recent police shooting of Jacob Blake, which resulted in renewed protests by Black Lives Matter activists, people have been taking a hard look at how African Americans have been treated by whites. In the arts there have been African American artists who have complained about having their work plagiarized by larger companies owned by whites.
Here’s one such example: A few months ago an African American social media influencer known as Studio Mucci has accused MGA Entertainment, the company behind the popular Bratz and LOL Surpise doll lines, of creating a LOL Surprise doll named Rainbow Raver that had brown skin and wore a similar hairstyle and clothes to what Studio Mucci wore at the time that this doll was released. In response Issac Larian, the white CEO of MGA Entertainment had issued a series of since-deleted tweets where he basically attacked her in a way that was unprofessional for a corporate CEO.
So the accusation of a white creator like Jake Parker plagiarizing a black creator like Alphonso Dunn in the year of civil unrest due to racism is definitely not good optics for Parker or even Inktober.
With both the name Inktober being trademarked and the plagiarism accusation against Parker, there are calls on Twitter to boycott Inktober this year. Some artists have decided not to participate at all while others are coming up with Inktober alternatives (such as Drawlloween, Artober, Drawtober, and OCtober—the latter being that you draw your own original characters during October, which explains why the first two letters are capitalized).
Last night I saw on Twitter that there are calls for another kind of protest. Jake Parker has already released his official Inktober prompt list for 2020. The prompt word for October 11 is “disgusting.” Some artists are calling for devoting October 11 to making drawings of Jake Parker himself then using the #Inktober and #Inktober2020 hashtags.
Given the controversy and the lack of time in my personal life, I’m starting to lean towards skipping Inktober and its alternatives this year. I think I want to focus more on longer creative projects where I can schedule working on them around that employment program that I’m currently enrolled in while leisurely spending my time doing the best work that I can without having to adhere to some artificial “one new drawing per day” deadline.
Oh how the mighty has fallen! Today Harvey Weinstein, who once headed Miramax and The Weinstein Company, was found guilty of rape in New York City. After the verdict was read he was immediately taken to prison. Here’s some footage of a handcuffed Harvey Weinstein being taken away from the courthouse after being found guilty.
https://twitter.com/LilithLovett/status/1232059682623115264
If all that weren’t enough, he still faces additional charges in Los Angeles.
Even though I’ve watched and enjoyed numerous films that both Miramax and The Weinstein Company had released over the years, I have zero sympathy for Harvey Weinstein. It kind of blows that I was among the many people who had been unwittingly financing the lifestyle of a rapist for many years simply by going to the movies.
On this occasion I’m going to repost this drawing that I originally did during the first year that I participated in Inktober way back in 2017. It was around the time that the New Yorker magazine and The New York Times both came out with their exposés of Weinstein. After reading about the sleazy details of Weinstein asking women to watch him shower and Weinstein being seen ejaculating into a hotel lobby’s potted plant I did this drawing of The Harvey Weinstein Action Figure.
UPDATE (March 11, 2020): Today Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison in New York City. And he still faces additional charges in Los Angeles.
For the past month I have been participating in Inktober where each day I worked on a new ink drawing then posted it online. In case you missed some or all of this, you can now view a video of my Inktober 2019 work right here.
Shortly before I prepared for Inktober I did a week-long series called The Drawings of Summer. I thought just doing some summer-themed drawings for one week would be a nice compliment to the general Halloween-themed Inktober, The 12 Drawings of Christmas, and The Drawings of Easter. My biggest mistake is that I didn’t get around to doing my summer drawings until the week before Labor Day. Part of the reason was because I was working a series of day jobs that took time that I could’ve devoted to drawing. But I could’ve made the time to do some drawing if I had been better organized with my time. By the time I thought about doing the Drawings of Summer for real I saw that Labor Day was coming the following week. By that point I figured that I should draw something for the summer before it was too late since most people in the United States tend not to think about summer after Labor Day.
By the time I finished my last drawing in that series on Labor Day, I found out that it was also the same day that the official Inktober prompt list was released so I went from finishing my summer drawing series to preparing to Inktober, which created unnecessary stress for myself.
If I decide to do the Drawings of Summer again next year, I would do them sometime between July 5 (after the Fourth of July holiday) and mid-August so I can do the drawings then take a longer breather before Inktober. (Of course that’s assuming that I’ll participate in Inktober next year.)
When I originally decided to take part in Inktober this year I thought I would have a challenge in squeezing time for this in early October and things would get better for me time-wise later in the month. That’s because I was doing work for the Census Bureau on the preliminary phase of the 2020 census and that particular work was going to end by mid-October. It turned out that everyone on the team that I was on was so efficient in doing their job that we ended up finishing a few weeks early by late September. On top of it I didn’t get a new day job during that month so I ended up having more time to devote to Inktober than I originally anticipated.
In past years I had a problem with coming up with what to draw, especially later in the month. Last year I tried sticking strictly with the official Inktober prompt list in the hopes I would have some daily inspiration only to struggle with half of the words on that prompt. This year I had a goal where I would have little trouble with finding something to draw. I looked at some of these alternative prompt lists and I found that, like the official one, there were some words that I could easily draw but there were others that I would’ve struggled with just as much as the ones on the official prompt list. There was literally no prompt list where I could’ve easily drawn every single word on it.
Since I learned that so many people have come up with their own prompt lists, I decided to pick one word from a different list to draw each day. So I started to take screenshots of any prompt lists where I found at least one word that I could easily draw, import these screenshots into Photoshop, and circle the words I could draw. Once I gathered at least 50 lists, I started to look at the lists, decide which words I want to draw on which day, and schedule them.
The biggest advantage is that I had no problem with doing a new drawing every day. Unfortunately the disadvantages of this method outnumber the one advantage. Finding 31 different prompt lists with 31 different words required a lot of preparation, including making sure that I didn’t end up drawing the same thing twice. There were times when I had 20 potential words on 20 different lists circled for—let’s say—October 15 and I had to make up my mind as to which of the 20 words I wanted to work on for October 15 and that was definitely time-consuming. Doing this method also required extensive note-taking because each prompt list creator asked anyone using that list to please tag that person and use appropriate hashtags, which is fair enough since each prompt list creator did go through the effort of coming up with the list in the first place. It just provided more work for me because I had to keep detailed notes so I could provide the proper credits.
Another disadvantage is that many of the creators of these alternative prompt lists didn’t upload their lists at the same time. There were days when I didn’t find any new lists for me to consider. I found that many of these prompt list creators didn’t upload their lists until late September. (In fact, I saw some prompt lists that didn’t get uploaded to Instagram until a day or two before October 1.) By mid-September I decided to get going on scheduling what prompt lists I would use on what day so I would have something to draw by the time Inktober began.
Like I wrote earlier, I was working for the Census Bureau in August and September, which definitely cut into my Inktober preparation time.
So I basically lost valuable time in preparing for Inktober. Late September became crunch time for me and there were a couple of nights when I stayed up until past midnight making pencil drafts of my Inktober drawings. In fact, I was still preparing pencil drawings for later in the month during the first three days of Inktober.
In addition I was writing rough drafts in TextEdit to accompany each drawing as I uploaded it in this blog and on various social media sites so I had to be careful to give credit to each of the prompt list creators along with appropriate hashtags and links. It was slightly less time-consuming than drawing but it was still time-consuming nonetheless. But it was worth the effort because on the allotted day, all I had to do was to do a quick copy and paste of each description of each drawing online.
I was hoping that by using these alternative list prompts I would get more attention by quality people. I felt that my drawings would stick out more by using a certain prompt list that was used by fewer people. The one big disadvantage of just sticking with the official Inktober prompt list is that many other people tend to do the same and they also use the appropriate hashtags and tag Jake Parker (the creator of Inktober who also comes out with the official prompt list) so your drawing could easily get lost in the shuffle.
Most of the prompt list creators reacted pretty enthusiastically to my using their prompt lists to create my drawings. Many of them left kind words in the comments on Instagram, where the majority of them hung out. (I also credited them on Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr as well but all of the prompt list creators’ comments were on Instagram.) So it was all good.
I only had one prompt list creator ask me to remove a hashtag from my Instagram caption because she has her own portfolio on Instagram where she uses that hashtag and she has potential employers search her portfolio using that hashtag and she didn’t want my drawing to get mixed in with her work. Okay, fair enough. I removed that hashtag but, personally, I think she should get a separate website that’s just devoted to her portfolio instead of relying solely on Instagram. While I complied with her request, there’s always the chance that another Instagram user will use her portfolio hashtag for his/her own caption and that person won’t remove it so that person’s Instagram post will show up alongside the artist’s work when potential employers search on that portfolio hashtag. At least with a dedicated website she wouldn’t have those problems. If money is the issue, she can always look at free web hosts like NeoCities or Wix. Heck, many of those free web hosts have wizards that will automatically create a site without having to even know how to code in HTML—all you need to do is to select the template and the wizard will do the rest.
It was pretty cool having the prompt list creators really loving the fact that I used their lists, even if it was for only one day. That’s definitely a far cry from last year when I stuck to only the official Instagram prompt list only to have my drawings get lost in the shuffle. Overall I think dealing with 31 prompt lists over 31 days was a bit much. If I was to do it again, I would use the words on the same prompt list for five to ten days before switching to a new list so I would only have to deal with three to six prompt lists instead of 31 different prompt lists.
After October 3, when I finished the basic outline of all of the drawings, I was able to relax and just go with the Inktober flow. Like last year I started my drawings in pencil, which is within the Inktober rules. But then I started to ink over about 90 percent of my drawings while leaving just a small portion unfinished until the allotted day when I would finish the last inking before I took photos. I know it’s cheating but it’s the only way that I can keep up with doing 31 drawings for 31 straight days in a row. It also allows me to spend just one hour or less each day putting the finishing touches on a drawing, taking a photo, then uploading it online while I copied and pasted my pre-written text that went with each drawing.
I also did it this way so I could put Inktober completely behind me after October 31. Over the past year I followed the #Inktober2018 hashtag on Instagram and I saw people still working on their Inktober drawings and posting them online until well into summer 2019. I have to admire them for their perseverance in finishing all 31 Inktober drawings over many months. As for me, I’m not really into doing seasonal drawings out of season because it makes me feel pretty disoriented to draw fall/Halloween/Day of the Dead related stuff in the spring or summer.
I had some unexpected surprises happen to me as a result of participating in Inktober. I have a Facebook friend who’s also one of my neighbors who saw my drawings and proposed something interesting. A few months ago she had decided to participate in this art project known as The Sketchbook Project at Brooklyn Art Library. The idea is to fill out a sketchbook then mail it to the Brooklyn Art Library in New York City where it will be part of the permanent collection. The only thing is that she apparently grew too busy to even begin that project so she asked me if I would like to have her project for free.
I thought it was a pretty cool idea so I said yes. The sketchbook is basically a small one that’s about the same size as the sketchbook I used for my Inktober drawings except it has fewer pages than that other one. I also have to mail it in by February 1, 2020. I am eager to begin drawing in it once I take a short recuperation break from Inktober.
Since I had already done so much of the preparation work for Inktober in my other sketchbook, I couldn’t switch to that newer sketchbook. But I could use that sketchbook for doing my 12 Drawings of Christmas series in December.
I’m also allowed to put photos in there as well. I’m going to go through my treasure trove of photos for anything that looks interesting enough to be included in that sketchbook. I would print it out then glue it into the sketchbook using a glue stick.
That wasn’t the only surprise during this year’s Inktober month. I had someone on Instagram actually like my Thor drawing that I did for last year’s Inktober, which really surprised me. But then, a few days later, I had someone on Flickr like my jack o’lantern drawing I did for the last day of Inktober 2017 two years ago, which goes to show that you shouldn’t despair if what you post online doesn’t get enough likes immediately because sometimes you’ll get someone liking your stuff months or even years later.
I felt relatively relaxed this year during the month itself because I didn’t have to struggle with figuring out what to draw on a certain day since I went through so much time going through 31 different prompt lists. As a result, I didn’t begin to feel as much burnout as the last two years. Instead I felt burnout before Inktober started and that was because of dealing with those 31 words/31 prompt lists. I worked through the burnout and it was smooth sailing once I got everything settled. Although I began to feel burnout again towards the end because I was trying to squeeze Inktober between checking out the local Halloween festivities and preparing for Halloween in my own home.
Plus I had a few unexpected challenges going on in my personal life that coincided with Inktober. Here’s some background. My homeowner’s association has been working on a major project for the past few years. The idea is to upgrade the heating and air conditioning in order to make each townhouse unit more energy efficient. The association has been working on just a few townhouses at a time because it is such a massive undertaking. In mid-October I got a sudden notice that my townhouse is next on the list to get those improvements, which probably won’t begin until next spring since winter is coming soon. As part of the preparations, I had to let some people into my townhouse so they can assess it on what needed to be done.
So I had to devote a considerable amount of free time to tidy up the house and do major decluttering (which needed to be done anyway but it’s always stressful when there is a deadline) and get my housemate to do the same. That was another reason why I was so glad that I pre-drew and pre-inked about 90% of each drawing ahead of time because I would’ve had to drop out of Inktober otherwise. It was stressful enough trying to squeeze in finishing the last 10% of each drawing then shooting a photo of it and uploading it online.
And then I lost my phone on October 30. I went on a shopping errand to Lidl. I remember pulling out my phone so I could use the MyLidl app. But then I put it down somewhere and I realized that my phone was missing when I got to the car. I started searching the car then I went back inside the store. I asked the store clerk who checked me out and she didn’t see a phone. I even checked the store’s Lost and Found with no luck.
The only silver lining is that I managed to finish drawing, photographing, and uploading my Inktober drawing for that day before I went off to Lidl. But I had one remaining Inktober drawing to work on the next day and that was the last drawing of my whole Inktober 2019 series.
I was pretty upset with losing my only phone. The good news is that my housemate had an extra smartphone that he bought used off of eBay that he decided to let me use. I will eventually have to come up with $200 (which is how much he paid for it). I contacted my phone carrier to report my phone as lost and that carrier mailed a SIM card to the nearest Target. I went there the next day on Halloween and it hadn’t arrived.
Since this new phone was inoperable without the SIM card, I decided to pull out my Canon PowerShot camera. I recharged the battery, and used it to take the photo last Inktober drawing so I would have something to upload online on the last day of Inktober (which was also Halloween) and just put Inktober 2019 behind me. These days I keep the Canon camera as a backup in case I somehow can’t use the smartphone camera and it really does come in handy. The fact that it takes good pictures and it’s small enough so storage isn’t a problem is a definitely plus for me. I finally got the SIM card for the phone on November 1 but I’m still keeping the Canon camera around for the time being.
I also had some discussion with my housemate about something personal on the same night that I lost my smartphone and I almost blew up at him. I was already upset from losing the phone and I really wasn’t in the mood to discuss it at the moment but he insisted. I somehow managed to hold it together and not yell at him because he is basically a good guy and stuff. (He’s been a big help to me for the past several months.) I was still depressed the following morning over the phone and discussion with my housemate. The crappy weather didn’t help at all. (It rained all day on October 30 and most of October 31. It was a miracle that it stopped raining for a few hours so the kids could go Trick or Treating.) Finishing that final ink drawing on Halloween morning had calmed me down from that discussion with my housemate the night before but I still felt down and depressed from the previous day’s events and that rainy weather wasn’t helping at all.
But then the rain had stopped and the weather was warm. I ended up sitting outside with a couple of my neighbors sipping wine, eating some snacks, and handing out treats to the costumed kids. It was so warm outside that I was wearing a t-shirt (which replicated Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon album cover), which is unusual for October in Maryland. About a half an hour before the official Trick or Treat time ended I drove down a few blocks to the home of a couple of friends of mine because they tend to turn their home into a Haunted Glen and they even recruited other friends to help out, which was cool. A couple of hours after Trick or Treating ended, the rain returned with a vengeance complete with high winds and I even lost power when I was getting ready to go to bed. At least the power was restored a few hours later because I woke up around 1:30 in the morning when the bedroom light was turned back on. (I forgot to turn the switch back to off before I went to bed.)
As for sharing online, I posted all of my drawings in this blog and uploaded them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I uploaded only certain drawings (mainly my relatively tamer drawings that were controversy-free) on LinkedIn and Jobcase because those two are professional social media sites that are more job-oriented.
I even figured out how to get the Like counts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Jobcase this year so I can do a more accurate count of which drawings people liked the best. (Previous years I only counted the likes in this blog, Flickr, and Instagram because they were easy to figure out.)
Based on the amount of Likes I counted on all of the social media sites and this blog, here is a list of my top 10 Inktober drawings.
1. Bumblebee
2. Madeline Hatter
3. Fox
4. Lilo from Lilo & Stitch
5. Furby
6. Owl
7. Mime
8. (Tied) Giraffe and Homey D. Clown Spanking Donald Trump
9. Maria the Robot from Metropolis
10. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast
And here is the list of the bottom five as ranked from most to least popular.
1. The Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz
2. Black Aggie
3. Cow
4. (Tied) Bambi and The Grave of Ouija Board Inventor Elijah Jefferson Bond
5. Toralei Stripe from Monster High
It’s been a lot of work yet it’s been a blast. As of this writing, I don’t know if I’ll participate in Inktober next year or how I’ll participate. (I could reduce the number of drawings for that month to something like 15 or less. Or I could once again do the full 31 drawings in 31 days. It really depends on what I will have going on in my life next year and things like that.) Right now I’m just going to take a break from doing the daily drawings because I have earned it.
I’ve come to the last day of Inktober (which is also Halloween). I decided to use The Occult prompt list that was created by the Instagram user alex.the.nerd.bird. Today’s word is “Ouija.” Way back in 2014 I visited the grave of Elijah Jefferson Bond, who invented the Ouija board, at Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. I made this drawing based on my photo of his headstone. Today is Halloween and tomorrow is the first day of the Day of the Dead so it’s appropriate to have a cemetery drawing like this.
Yes, there is actually an Ouija board engraved on one side of the headstone. It definitely makes Bond’s grave stand out among the other nearby graves. This drawing marks the official end of my involvement in Inktober 2019. I’m going to take a break and enjoy Halloween and Day of the Dead before I take a look at how well my participation in Inktober went for me this year.
Happy Halloween! 🙂
For today’s Inktober drawing I decided to use today’s prompt word that’s on the Ink-Creature-Tober list that was created by the Instagram user borksartworks. Today’s word is “werecat” so I decided to draw Toralei Stripe of Monster High, who is a werecat. This drawing is based on a Toralei doll that I own.
Tomorrow is the last day of Inktober and it is also Halloween as well. I’ll have something appropriate for both occasions to post here tomorrow so come back and check this blog out! 😉
For today’s Inktober drawing I decided to use today’s prompt word that’s on the Strawberrytober Cute Kawaii Prompt List that was created by the Instagram user strawberrystyl. Today’s prompt is “cute bat” so I drew this cute bat using a free tutorial that’s posted on the Hello Kids website.
Two more days and two more drawings until Inktober is finished for me. 🙂
For today’s Inktober drawing I decided to use today’s prompt word that’s on the Tony’s Spooky Circus list that was created by the Instagram users slothgeuse and tonys_spookymuseum. Today’s prompt is Homey D. Clown, which I literally jumped at the chance because I used to love watching the Homey segments on the old In Living Color TV show. I decided to imagine what if Homey D. Clown was still around and he actually meets President Donald Trump in person, especially in light of Trump’s recent tweets about wanting to start another American civil war.
Unfortunately there are people who are willing to answer Trump’s call for a new civil war. This video has the details.
I just want to mention that I had originally planned to do this drawing on this day a few weeks ago. The fact that I inked it and posted it online the day after Trump got booed by the Washington Nationals fans at the World Series made doing this one even sweeter.
And that’s not to mention that today he received an equally frosty reception when he arrived in Chicago.
Three more days and three more drawings until Inktober 2019 ends for me. 🙂
Sagittarius Dolly 
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