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Last week I wrote a post about a video I made where I played around with one of TikTok’s filters and I ended up shooting what looked like Alice in Wonderland dancing in the middle of Walmart. It’s really an exercise in augmented reality but it was pretty fun and easy to shoot nonetheless.
And speaking in dancing in middle of Walmart and other public stores, I’m going to discuss Madonna Girl Dale for a bit. Madonna Girl Dale (who is also known as Britney Girl Dale and Kesha Girl Dale) is a transgender woman and major Madonna fan who have spent at least the last few decades dancing along major highways and inside of big box retailers dressed as Madonna. She was once the subject of an article in The Baltimore Sun and she had appeared a few times on a radio morning show on 98 Rock. She even has an account on LinkedIn and the Internet Movie Database. Our paths had crossed a few times (most notably in 2014 and 2015).
In 2019 I managed to drive out to her then-hometown of Brooklyn Park to shoot video footage for what ended up being the documentary Madonna Girl Dale: Last Dance in Brooklyn Park. As you can tell from the title, it was the last time she danced alongside her usual place on Ritchie Highway in Brooklyn Park, Maryland before she decided to move to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At one point on the 17:50 mark I asked Madonna Girl Dale if she was going to continue dancing in retail stores and major highways in her new hometown or if she was going to retire but she didn’t give me a straight answer while acting like she was incredibly busy. (I had asked that question between songs while she was setting up some chairs along Ritchie Highway.)
In any case I now have the answer to that question I asked in that documentary a few years ago. For the past few months she has been posting videos of herself dancing in the most unlikely locations throughout Winston-Salem, North Carolina, such as on a tow truck…
…in a fast food restaurant…
…and even at a construction site. (I’m amazed that she was allowed to perform there because construction sites are usually closed off to the general public for safety and liability reasons.)
She sometimes gets thrown out of places, such as this time when she attempted to dance in the middle of a Lidl grocery store.
She has also been thrown out of a Lowe’s store as well.
She has even resumed her old habit of dancing alongside busy roads.
She’s been posting her videos on YouTube and her two TikTok channels (TikTok1 and TikTok2). In any case I saw that she had posted a TikTok video of herself dancing in a Walmart so I decided to do a silly video that’s a parody on those instructional videos that one can find on both YouTube and TikTok. I combined that Madonna Girl Dale video with my earlier Alice in Wonderland video into a tutorial on how to make a dancing in Walmart video. I used InShot for my clip and I even used the app’s Picture in Picture (PIP) feature for the first time. I uploaded my video on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Enjoy!
Every now and then I try out a TikTok filter. During a recent trip to Walmart I decided to try the filter that has Alice in Wonderland dancing. So I did this short video where Alice is dancing to The Archies song “Sugar, Sugar” in the middle of the grocery section of Walmart I uploaded it on to TikTok then crossposted it into Instagram and YouTube. Enjoy!
And speaking of The Archies song “Sugar, Sugar,” I looked through YouTube for the heck of it and I found that there are two official video versions of the same song. One is a live action video where it looks like the same guy is singing and playing all of the instruments.
The other is an animated version that takes clips from the old Saturday morning TV cartoon show Archie. (Of course the cartoon was based on the long-running comic book series of the same name.)
The Real Littles have come out with a new series of miniature purses and backpacks that are perfectly scaled for my Disney Nuimos and they are way cheaper than the Loungefly backpacks that are made especially for the Nuimos. (Each Real Littles bag costs around $7 each while the Loungefly backpacks each costs almost $22 each. What’s more the Real Littles bags come with tiny accessories inside while the Loungefly ones don’t.)
I found this white rabbit purse at Target and I bought it because it reminded me so much of Alice in Wonderland. I had my Disney Nuimos Angel claim it because I have her dressed in the Alice outfit. I did an unboxing video that I uploaded on to TikTok and YouTube.
Yesterday Rush Limbaugh died of cancer at the age of 70. I normally don’t take glee at a person’s death unless the person in question is one that is as odious as Rush Limbaugh. I once featured him in my artwork called Alice at the Tea Party, where I portrayed him as the Cheshire Cat (located in the lower left corner).
You can read more about this artwork here.
I was first familiar with him when my sister-in-law’s Republican then-husband told my own then-husband about how funny and entertaining Rush’s show was. We decided to give Rush Limbaugh’s show a chance when we were making one of our eight-hour commutes from DC to Rochester (where my sister-in-law lived at the time) and we were looking for something to listen to on the car radio. I know it was sometime in the late 1980s-early 1990s because his show started with this statement where he said “Day ______ of America held hostage!” I’ve since forgotten the number of the exact day but my mathematician husband quickly figured out that he was counting the number of days that America was supposedly being held “hostage” from the day that Bill Clinton was elected president.
It was downhill from that opening statement. Apparently Rush Limbaugh had recently attended some kind of red carpet event in Hollywood (I forgot exactly what event it was) and he was talking about how he was there and he was constantly name dropping celebrities he encountered at that event. This went on for over a half-an-hour where he just talked about himself meeting these celebrities. He just came across as being so boring to listen to. My husband soon changed the station to one that played music. We were both turned off of that guy that day.
I would occasionally hear snippets from Rush’s show on other programs and there was nothing he said that made me change my low opinion of that guy. There was the one time years ago when my neighborhood had electrical problems and Pepco sent a truck to check out the wires. The truck had Rush Limbaugh’s show playing on the radio and it was cranked up loud enough so that not only the employees could hear it but I could from inside of my house. I ended up playing music in order to drown out that show.
Rush Limbaugh was a man who became famous for constantly bashing women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, Democrats, and numerous others. As this Wonkette article explains:
Limbaugh was a bully and a coward (his entire show was a “safe space”). He taught a generation of white people that it was OK to laugh at the vulnerable and ridicule the already despised. He never articulated a coherent philosophy other than liberals and minorities bad. One of his most enduring contributions to the political discourse is calling feminists “feminazis,” presumably because feminists support abortion rights, although that’s ascribing too much nuance to his name calling.
If you need more evidence on how bad Limbaugh could get, this link has a timeline of his most racist moments.
When Rush Limbaugh admitted back in 2003 that he was seeking treatment because he had become addicted to painkillers, you’d think that it would humble him enough to make him start to feel empathy for others. Nope, he was still just as hateful on the air after he left treatment as he was before. Having Elton John perform at his last wedding while even maintaining a friendship with him wasn’t enough to change his attitude towards LGBTQ people.
Yesterday Keith Olbermann tweeted this: “All I can think of is the Sunday circa ’94 I arrived at my desk at ESPN to find an awestruck Rush Limbaugh standing there looking into the ESPN Newsroom, gushing over our work, and quietly saying ‘I’d trade everything I’ve ever had if I could co-host SportsCenter.’ Wish he had.”
Actually Rush Limbaugh had a sports announcer gig on ESPN in 2003, which turned out to be very brief when he went on that network’s Sunday NFL Countdown and he went off on Philadelphia Eagles African American quarterback Donovan McNabb by saying that McNabb isn’t really that good of a player and he only got as far as he did because he’s black. Limbaugh ended up resigning from ESPN after a public outcry rose up over his remarks.
That outcry was justified if you take a look at McNabb’s career up to the time of Limbaugh’s remarks and conclude that the Philadelphia Eagles was right in making McNabb its quarterback. Sports is one of those things where one can objectively rank a person’s performance on the playing field without having to consider race, class, or other social factors. And that person’s performance is frequently made in the public eye and recorded by the media so it can be referenced later. You can’t hide or try to gloss over anything in sports. You either catch the ball or you don’t. You either stay in bounds while having the ball or you go out of bounds and get stopped by the referee. You either make that touchdown or you don’t. Limbaugh was clearly out of bounds when he attempted to criticize McNabb on the basis of his race.
He even went after companies who tried to treat their workers with dignity. When Dan Price, the founder and CEO of Gravity Payments, decided to take a pay cut so his workers can get raises, Rush Limbaugh decided to talk about it on his show. As Price recounts in this Twitter thread, Limbaugh said “I hope this company is a case study in MBA programs on how socialism does not work, because it’s gonna fail.” It turned out that Limbaugh was only partially correct. Gravity Payments did become a case study in MBA programs but it was on how the CEO taking a pay cut and providing raises to workers had resulted in a triple in revenue while retention and productivity skyrocketed. Limbaugh never mentioned Dan Price or Gravity Payments on his show again nor did he invite Price to come on his show to discuss the issue. Price said that, to this day, a sizable number of Limbaugh’s audience has incorrectly assumed that Gravity Payments is now defunct and that one of the top auto-complete Google searches for Gravity Payments is “out of business.”
The biggest joke about Rush Limbaugh is that he talked about family values. He once condemned a law student named Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and a “prostitute” because she gave testimony on Capitol Hill in front of lawmakers in support of mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives. For all his talk about family values and morality, Rush Limbaugh had been divorced three times and was in his fourth marriage at the time of his death.
He has never apologized for any of his excesses (which includes making fun of a then-12-year-old Chelsea Clinton by referring to her as a “dog”). What’s more, his radio show has directly contributed to a coarsening of American discourse where it’s okay to call people awful names and make fun of any disabilities they may have. Here’s an example: Back in 2006 Rush Limbaugh made fun of actor Michael J. Fox having Parkinson’s disease.
One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that what Rush did has paved the way for others to emulate him, such as Donald Trump making fun of a New York Times reporter’s disability during a 2016 campaign rally.
Despite that grotesque lack of sensitivity on display, Trump managed to not only have his campaign survive the outcry from that incident but he was elected president.
I consider it to be a travesty that President Donald Trump had decided to award Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom last year. Previous recipients (such as E.B. White, Walt Disney, Neil Armstrong, Georgia O’Keefe, Jonas Salk, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Lucille Ball, Arthur Ashe, Rosa Parks, Fred Rogers, and John Glenn) had made positive contributions that changed America for the better. Limbaugh, with his hateful rhetoric, definitely sticks out like a sore thumb among these previous recipients.
For years his opponents had tried everything to get his show off the air by doing things like boycotting his show’s advertisers. Yet his program didn’t leave the air until December when he felt too ill to continue. What finally did Rush Limbaugh in was the fact that he loved cigars so much that he was once featured in Cigar Aficionado magazine while claiming that “Smokers aren’t killing anybody.” He died of lung cancer so it was obvious that he was wrong about smokers not killing anybody.
The only positive thing I can even say about Rush Limbaugh is that he was once the subject of a hilariously brutal yet accurate Beavis and Butt-head parody called “Right On!” You can view the animation right here but, just in case it gets wiped off-line in the future, I’ll provide a link to a text synopsis of it.
As for Rush Limbaugh himself, I say good riddance to bad rubbish.
For today’s Inktober drawing I used the Alice in Wonderland prompt list that was created by the Instagram user lilyzme. Today’s prompt was the Mad Hatter. I decided to do something different by drawing a doll from Mattel’s discontinued Ever After High line. (Ever After High is a special high school whose students are all children of the famous fairy tale characters.)
Her name is Madelyn Hatter and she is described as the Mad Hatter’s daughter. I purchased this doll when the local Kmart was having its going out of business sale a few years back. The details of this one are incredible, complete with tea-related designs.
Like I wrote in a previous blog post, I attended two festivals in one day. The first one was the smaller Greenbelt Blues Festival, which I already wrote about. After attending that festival, I went to the Hyattsville Arts & Ales Festival, which was a larger event. Here are the photos I took of the event while I was there.
This sign erroneously said that this festival was held on September 10. In reality, it showed up on September 22.
The festival was well-attended and there were all kinds of arts and crafts on display along with local bands performing. The local craft breweries were selling their craft beers and ales. The weather was warm and pleasant (the humidity was low that day). All in all I had a good time and many of the festival goers also enjoyed themselves as well.
I only purchased one item at this festival. It’s a small bar of soap made from honey and it has a bee motif on it.
Study confirms this method of repelling ticks really does work.
Serfdom in the Magic Kingdom: Disney workers rise up against poverty-level wages.
Dolls Who Code: Barbie-branded coding lessons start this summer.
The Trump-Russia-NRA connection: What you need to know.
You might be a genius, if you share this key trait with Leonardo da Vinci.
Want to stop fake news? Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine.
Why Mike Pence won’t be president.
Black man graduates with law degree and MBA from two different schools on the same day.
Remembering Kent State 45 years later.
“Jesus never charged a leper a co-pay”: The rise of the religious left.
So I spent the day after Thanksgiving engaging in alternatives to the usual Black Friday shopping madness. First I went to Community Forklift, which was having its Green Friday event. Then I went to Riverdale Park and checked out a couple of local stores there. The last thing I did on Black Friday was head on to Hyattsville, where a few of the locally owned businesses were having their own alternatives to Black Friday. All of the businesses were located within walking distance of each other so all I had to do was just park my car then spend the rest of the time walking everywhere.
I initially went to Studio SoHy, which had this really cool table made from a log in the restroom.
Studio SoHy had this skateboarding-themed exhibition featuring photographs of skateboarders and skateboards that were painted with some really cool designs.
Next I went on to the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center. I encountered these items with labels that reminded me of Alice in Wonderland.
They basically offered pecan pie and apple pie.
They had a 10 x 10 show where people can purchase 10 inch x 10 inch prints that were made there.
Then I went on to Tanglewood Works, where I took these pictures.
I ended my Black Friday wanderings by stopping briefly inside the Three Little Birds Sewing Co.
Today is the day after Halloween and the first day of the two-day Mexican holiday known as El Día De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead). In addition, Inktober officially ended right on Halloween yesterday. I succeeded in drawing and uploading 31 ink drawings in 31 days from October 1-31. I finished Inktober at the same time as I ended up getting sick with this stomach flu where I constantly felt nauseous and I alternated between going through dry heaves and diarrhea. The fact that it also happened on the same day as Halloween totally sucks. I barely managed to get myself together enough to give out treats to the trick or treaters. Instead of going to a Halloween night party at a friend’s house, I had to make an emergency run to Giant after the official trick or treat time ended just so I could pick up some medication and toilet paper.
Today I feel better in that the dry heaves and diarrhea has subsided and I feel mostly tired. I took a nap today and I’ll probably go to bed early tonight so I can rest some more.
As I go over the drawings I did during the month, I realized that I could easily put them into certain categories (with many of those drawings falling under more than one category).
Animals: Penguin, panda bear, black cat, dinosaur, swan, pig, two former ride cars from the now-defunct Enchanted Forest amusement park shaped like a duckling and a swan, Willie the Whale, goat, and Zombie Dog.
Based on Dolls I Currently Own: Volks Dollfie Dream, Batgirl and Wonder Woman (with Donald Trump and by themselves).
Building: Crooked House.
Clark’s Elioak Farm: Two former ride cars from the now-defunct Enchanted Forest shaped like a duckling and a swan, the Crooked House, Willie the Whale, goat.
Death Penalty: Guillotine.
Friday the 13th: Black cat.
Halloween/Day of the Dead: The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, Goat Man, Zombie Dog, Day of the Dead skeleton, Frankenstein, Jack O’Lantern.
Hollywood Scandal: Harvey Weinstein.
My Own 100% Original Character: Zombie Dog.
Native American (For Indigenous Peoples Day a.k.a. Columbus Day): Wolf kachina.
Real People: Donald Trump with Jesus Christ, Donald Trump again (with Wonder Woman and Batgirl), Donald Trump yet again, Donald Trump one more time, Tom Petty, burlesque performer Reverend Valentine, Harvey Weinstein, my father-in-law, my mother (which also includes Elvis Presley), Madonna Girl Dale.
Religious-Related Drawings: Jesus Christ (with Donald Trump), Unitarian Universalist flaming chalice, wolf kachina.
People Who Celebrated a Birthday During Inktober: My mother.
People Who Died During Inktober: Tom Petty and my father-in-law.
Politics: Donald Trump with Jesus Christ, Donald Trump again (with Wonder Woman and Batgirl), Donald Trump yet again, Donald Trump one more time.
Relatives: My father-in-law and mother.
Superheroes: Batgirl and Wonder Woman together with Donald Trump and by themselves.
Supernatural Book/Movie Characters: The Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein.
Virtual Models from Figurosity.com: Woman running with a gun, woman dressed in psychedelic tye-dye outfit holding a gun.
The biggest challenge for me is that working on a new drawing a day then uploading it online to this blog and various social media sites took a portion of my time that I could’ve spent doing other things (such as doing house cleaning, putting up Halloween decorations, sending out a few more resumes). That was the main reason why I had quit a previous effort to do one new drawing per day starting on January 1, 2016 (which was a New Year’s resolution). I think the reason why I was more successful at Inktober than my previous daily drawing effort last year was because I knew it was only for 31 days that I had to worry about doing a new drawing each day. After that I could draw as much or as little as I wanted.
Even though there was an official Inktober prompt list of one word for each different day, I was more interested in doing my own thing since this is the first year I participated in this. (Inktober has been going on since 2009.) I only used the official prompt list if I was stumped for inspiration. Now that I got my desire to draw whatever I wanted for Inktober out of my system, I’m thinking that if I was to do this again next year, I would discipline myself by sticking strictly with the prompt list. It would be a way to challenge myself, especially since I’m sure that there will be a word or two that will have me totally stumped at first.
The biggest benefit I got from Inktober is that I was able to learn which social media sites gave me the best exposure in terms of publicizing myself and my work. I uploaded my drawings to the current popular social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) as well as other social media sites I haven’t posted anything in a while. These sites used to be relatively popular until they were overshadowed by Facebook/Instagram/Twitter. I decided to upload to them because I wanted to see if I should still bother with them. I found that the absolute worst were Flickr and Google+ because I only got one “Like” on both platforms and that was it. Tumblr was hit or miss in that I got maybe one or two Notes (which is Tumblr’s version of “Like”) for some of my drawings but there were others that got zero Notes. (The one drawing that got the most attention was the one I did of Tom Petty and that one only got four Notes.) Minds, the open source alternative social media site, was just as hit or miss as Tumblr in that I got maybe one or two “Likes” on some drawings but others were totally ignored.
By far the best response I got was on this blog and Instagram. In fact I got new followers on both platforms because of Inktober. Twitter came in at a close second in that I also got new followers as well as retweets. Facebook was surprisingly more of a mixed-bag. While I got a better response than Flickr, Google+, Tumblr, and Minds combined, the response rate was lower than this blog, Instagram, and Twitter.
The one major social media site that I didn’t use was LinkedIn because that one is more of a professional social media site and some of my drawings were either too political (such as the ones featuring Donald Trump) or the subject matter was one where I just didn’t feel comfortable in posting there (such as the one about the Harvey Weinstein action figure). I’ve seen people get chewed out on LinkedIn for posting anything that was even remotely controversial (especially one that’s political) and I’d rather avoid it since it’s common knowledge that would-be employers tend to look you up on LinkedIn to see if you’re someone they would even want to hire. I don’t want to lose out on any potential opportunity because of some post I made there.
It was time consuming to upload the same drawing on so many different social media sites per day but at least I gained knowledge on which ones are worth investing my time in promoting myself in the future so it was worth it in the end.
I also learned that there is certain value in practicing drawing only for yourself because you’ll never know when one of those drawings you’ve done have struck inspiration to do a regular art project based on what you’ve drawn. I’m thinking about doing a watercolor version of that swan I drew during Inktober because I really liked the results.
Another positive result of Inktober is that I discovered Figurosity.com and that site was valuable in providing virtual models for me to practice my drawing with. I plan to use that site for my drawing more often.
I also looked at other people’s Inktober drawings on social media and I was amazed by the amount of creativity I saw there. There were a few people who did some really ambitious things for Inktober. I saw some people do two or more drawings per day, which I personally admired since I found it a challenge to do even one new drawing in a small sketchbook every single day. I saw one guy who was working on a graphic novel and he decided to use Inktober to draw and ink one new page per day. There was another person who decided to use Inktober do a large complex drawing where the person inked just one section of that drawing each day with the goal being that the large complex drawing would be completed on October 31.
The biggest challenge with Inktober is to maintain my enthusiasm for continuing with drawing one new drawing per day then uploading it online. The first few days I was very eager and enthusiastic. But then I came down with this nasty cold but I continued to work through that cold even though my body wanted to get more sleep so it can knock off those cold germs. After I got rid of that cold I began to gradually view the daily Inktober sketches more and more as some time-consuming daily chore instead of something that I was excited and enthusiastic about. Even though I tried to keep the designs relatively simple and I used a small sketchpad, I still found myself burning out towards the end. This was especially true when I wanted to put up Halloween decorations or go to some Halloween-related local event only to remind myself that I needed to make time for my daily Inktober drawings.
By the last week I went to Clark’s Elioak Farm because I wanted to draw enough pencil sketches so I could just ink over them on the allotted day for the next few days. Then I spent one additional evening filling up my sketchbook with enough Halloween-themed pencil sketches to last me until the very end of the month.
But then I began to just burn out on even doing the ink over the pencil outlines, especially during that last weekend before Halloween. I started to partially-ink over more than one pencil sketch a day or two before the allotted date while leaving each one intentionally unfinished until the allotted date, when I would finish it so I could technically say that I did work on one new drawing per day each day during Inktober. One evening, about two nights before the end of Inktober, I used my free time to do the bulk of the inking on my scheduled drawings of the last two days while leaving just a small area of each drawing unfinished so I could spend less than 15 minutes completing each drawing on the allotted day.
I did it this way because I grew tired of spending anywhere from a half-an-hour to a full hour working on each new drawing then spending additional time photographing my drawing then uploading it on my various social media accounts. You may think that I was cheating but I don’t care. If I hadn’t done something like this, I would’ve grown so tired of spending a chunk of time on my Inktober sketch that I would’ve quit just days before October 31.
Right now I’m typing this in the early days of NaNoWriMo, which is something similar to Inktober where you spend every day in November writing your novel. I’ve read about people who are doing NaNoWriMo but I’m definitely not taking part in this. Spending time each day doing Inktober was enough for me without having to go from doing daily Inktober drawings in October to writing daily NaNoWriMo prose in November.
Now that Inktober is over, I’m going to take some time off from drawing on a daily basis because I have other things in my life that I need to focus on (such as the upcoming winter holidays in December). Ultimately I’m going to try doing a new drawing in my sketchbook at least once a month. I would do this by just working on that drawing in blocks of 15 minutes on a given day (and that would be only if I had extra time available for me to do such a drawing). I would keep on working on the same drawing, 15 minutes at a time and one day at a time, until I’m finished. Basically I want to practice my drawing but on a more leisurely schedule where I can balance that with other activities that require my attention at the same time.
Of course only time will tell whether I actually achieve this. (LOL!) But I’m willing to at least give it a try.
Here are a few things I would advise a person who’s thinking about doing either Inktober next year or simply wants to devote a different month to doing one drawing per day (such as December or March or June):
1. Don’t obsess too much about drawing supplies. I know the official Inktober site has a list of recommended supplies but some of these supplies (such as Micron pens) can be pretty expensive to those on a tight budget. If you can’t afford the recommended Inktober supplies, don’t fret. Just go with cheaper supplies instead. I did my Inktober drawings using a cheap pack of multicolored Paper Mate InkJoy pens that I purchased at Target for only $10. And I wasn’t the only one who didn’t use the best supplies either. I saw quite a few Inktober drawings that were done only with the cheap disposable blue ink Bic ballpoint pens and I found them to be just as interesting and well-done as the ones that were used with the more expensive pens. As for drawing paper, I would recommend shopping around because sometimes you can find the best bargains. Here’s one example: I’ve seen 9” x 12” (23 cm x 30 cm) sketchbook drawing pads on sale at my local Five Below store for only $5.
2. Use a small sketchbook that’s no bigger than 9” x 12” (23 cm x 30 cm). Not only will you fill up the page faster than with a larger sketchbook but a smaller sketchbook is more portable. I did my Inktober drawings using a 4” x 6” (10 cm x 15 cm) sketchbook. When I decided to travel to Clark’s Elioak Farm to do some more Inktober drawings, all I had to do was to put my sketchbook (along with my pens and pencils) in my purse and I was good to go. Heck, I saw some Inktober sketches online that were drawn on Post-It Notes.
3. If you can, try setting aside a certain time each day to work on your Inktober sketch. It could be when you wake up the first thing in the morning or after dinner or whenever. If you can’t commit to the same time every day, then just take advantage of whatever free time suddenly materializes to do your drawings. I’ve seen people admit that they did their Inktober sketches while riding public transportation on the way to or from their day jobs. I’ve even seen people admit that they did their drawings on the sly while being forced to sit in on a boring lecture at school or they took advantage of some downtime at work. Just do whatever works for you.
4. The one thing about Inktober I learned is that you can do some advance drawings in pencil as long as you wait until the designated day to do the final inking. In fact, I learned that this year’s official Inktober prompt list was put online two weeks before the month began so one could have the luxury to decide what he/she wanted to draw on the designated day and even do a rough sketch in pencil. I took advantage of this policy towards the end of the month when I began to burn out on doing a new drawing every day and I was in danger of quitting before the month was over. What I did was to go to Clark’s Elioak Farm, where I finished one new drawing in ink but I did other unfinished drawings in pencil that I could finish in ink over the next few days. By the time I finished that series, it was close to Halloween so I spent one evening just doing a pencil drawing of Madonna Girl Dale (who usually wears a costume in public all year round) followed by pencil drawings of traditional Halloween and Day of the Dead figures until the 31st drawing of the month. So I spent the last week of Inktober just coloring in one previously made pencil drawing in ink per day until I reached the last drawing on Halloween.
5. If you hit a rough patch where you really can’t focus on doing any complicated detailed drawings or you don’t have a lot of time to do anything too complex, just do a simple drawing that you can easily finish in 30 minutes or less. I experienced this challenge earlier this month when I came down with this horrible cold that literally left me feeling very weak and tired all the time. For those days I decided to do simple drawings of a penguin and a panda bear because those animals were relatively easy for me to draw quickly before I felt tired enough to take another nap. As an added bonus, those two drawings were basically black and white drawings so I didn’t have to do much thinking while I drew them. I also didn’t bother with drawing backgrounds because that would’ve been more time-consuming and I didn’t feel wide awake enough to draw something that would’ve been more complex.
6. Don’t be a perfectionist about your drawing. The whole purpose of Inktober is to practice your drawing, not focusing on being the next Rembrandt or Keith Haring. The idea is to do a quick drawing that can be done in a small part of your day.
7. Don’t be afraid of posting your drawings online, even if you personally feel less than enthusiastic about your latest drawing. I found that people tended to be really nice towards those who posted their Inktober drawings and many of them gave positive feedback. I personally didn’t encounter any cyberbullying in the month that I posted my Inktober drawings online. Just post your drawing online even if you personally don’t like it because there will be people who will like it better than you do.
Well, that’s it for Inktober 2017. I’ll end this post with a couple of embedded things in case you’ve missed some or all of the Inktober drawings I’ve been uploading over the past month. One is a YouTube video that includes some catchy background music.
If you prefer to view the pictures at your own pace without background music, you can view my Flickr album instead.
Sagittarius Dolly 
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