My first ever Inktober submission, and first ever chibi drawing. Not too shabby!
Before October of this year, I had been attempting to improve my drawing skills, but lacking confidence and direction. I had mainly been into art journaling, collage, and other mixed media dabbling, which conveniently allowed me to favor words over images and escape the need to draw anything over-complicated by smearing around lots of wet media and sticking things to it that someone else drew (or photographed).
That was (is) good fun, but at the same time, I knew I was cheating. I also knew how satisfied I felt when I did succeed in drawing something, whether it was following a tutorial from Rhomany’s Realm or sundry drawing books I had in the house. My degree in linguistics allowed me to understand that there’s no excuse for anyone to say they can’t learn languages…why was I insisting that I couldn’t learn to draw well?
Around September the online art community was talking about their plans for Inktober this year, and on a whim, I figured I would join in and make the attempt. I lined up a bunch of projects from the aforementioned tutorials and books, tossing in some reference photos of seashells and starfish and things that I figured were easy enough to draw fairly well.
Then October 1st arrived…and I blanked out. I didn’t want to draw anything I had planned, for some reason. I didn’t know what I wanted to draw, I only knew that my skills were limited and my inspiration flagging. But I’d committed to trying the challenge…so I needed a new tutorial or something, and I needed it now.
Thinkthinkthinkthink…and I suddenly remembered I had a little eBook tutorial by Christopher Hart called Draw Chibi Dark, featuring instructions on drawing two oddly cute little goth chibi characters. (Link is to Goodreads, because the book is apparently no longer available in any form.) I wasn’t terribly into manga, and barely understood what a chibi was, but I thought, “I got this”, and drew one of the chibi, posting it on Twitter and Instagram as my first Inktober submission.
At that point it dawned on me that tutorials are great confidence-boosters; I can create without the pressure of doing it from scratch. So I did the second chibi from that book the next day. And then on day three…uh-oh, no more chibi. But I couldn’t stop. The chibi had taken possession of my mind; they said, “You must draw us. This is your mission this month. We will not be unrepresented. Draw us, or perish.” Ok well, that’s not exactly how it happened (I’m slightly more sane than that), but it was obvious at this point that the chibi were running the show, and I was ready to draw them. I found YouTube chibi tutorials, website tutorials, books, if anything taught chibi, I drew it.
After about five days, it became clear that the month was now #chibitober for me. The chibi had decided. I was drawing them whether I wanted to or not. But I did want to — because by that time, I was having fun, getting likes, and doing a really not-too-shabby job of it. I was drawing cute stuff fairly well, and feeling good about it. What more can you ask for?
Will next year’s Inktober become #chibitober2018 for me? That remains to be seen. But it was the start of a project that is still increasing my drawing skills and giving me the experience and confidence that I was hoping to achieve.
So what happened at the end of the month, and afterwards? That’s a topic for a future post. Until then, go draw some chibi! (If you don’t, they will find you and make you draw them. If it can happen to me…)
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