If you’re unaware of what Inktober is, don’t worry. It’s simple.
Every October, artists post daily ink sketches over an endless variety of topics. The main prompt list is released every year by the creator of the phenomenon, Jake Parker.
According to Parker, he created Inktober in 2009 “as a challenge to improve [his] inking skills and develop positive drawing habits.” Since then, it has grown into a monolithic artistic phenomenon that many people, including I, look forward to every year.
There’s honestly no reason not to appreciate Inktober this year. With midterms right around the corner, having wonderful, diverse and inspiring art flooding our dash can brighten your month even when stress is killing you. Also, if you’re a budding artist, it can be a great source of inspiration!
Whether you participate or not is up to you, but supporting other artists takes less than a second! Here are some of my favorite artists that are actively participating in Inktober this year. For obvious reasons, I have not reposted any of their art for examples, so consider that an encouragement to check them out yourselves!
Vicki Tsai — vickisigh
Victoria is a Asian-American artist based in California with colorful, soft illustrations that almost seem to glow on their own. Most of her art is digital, but she’s going the traditional route for Inktober. Her theme is witches this year, so she’s littering our dashes with lovely witches and black cats all month long!
She and fellow artist, Anoosha Syed, are starting their own art-focused podcast called The Art Corner beginning mid-October! According to the podcast’s twitter, it will be them sharing their experience being illustrators as well as bringing in guests from all different artistic walks of life!
Autumn — akitron
Autumn is a freelance illustrator and graphic novelist based in Canada. Her art is very sketch-based and chaotic, creating charming characters filled with dynamic movement and life. She does almost exclusively traditional art with inks, Copic markers and pencils. This Inktober, she isn’t following a specific prompt, choosing instead to work on characters from her own comics.
She has a hilarious twitter where she posts her art, reblogs tons of funny posts and discusses important issues involving WOC and hijabi women.
You can look through her works and illustrations here and here, and she also has a Greek mythology comic available for preorder here!
Anoosha Syed — foxville_art
Anoosha is a children’s literature illustrator and character designer for animation who draws gorgeous and colorful fairytale-esque illustrations. Her Inktober theme this year is Pakistani fashion, and they’re beautiful and simplistic!
You may be familiar with Anoosha for several reasons! First off, this is the Anoosha who is starting an art podcast with Vicki Tsai, which I mentioned earlier. Secondly, Anoosha recently called out racist social media users on Twitter after she posted fan art of Harry Potter in which she depicted Hermione Granger as black. The results included J.K. Rowling retweeting the original post, Emma Watson giving Anoosha a shout-out, Huffington Post writing about it and the BBC interviewing Anoosha. Remember, lovely readers, art can have a positive impact!
Anoosha has a beautiful online portfolio here and a shop on her portfolio that will reopen at the end of October.
There are countless other artists out there participating in Inktober, but these lovely women should be a good jumping-off point for you to begin your Inktober journey. Also, if you find any cool artists out there, don’t forget to let me know.