Inspired by the concept of the Inktober drawing challenge, but not by this year’s prompts, I decided to make my own version: Cathtober. The rules were simple: using a random word generator, draw one illustration per day in India ink, on an A3 sheet of paper.

And over the last 31 days, I managed to stick to them. Mostly. Being a huge fan of structure and punctuality, I love deadlines, but it turns out I love following my best ideas more. This resulted in my being late about three or four times, as I applied my trusted “draw today, ink tomorrow” technique to the more complex illustrations of the bunch.

Besides having fun exploring random concepts, the main objective of this project was for me to let go of perfectionism. I can’t say this was entirely achieved—I censored myself for “Gloom”, as my idea would have taken about 10 hours to execute in accordance with my vision—but there are some imperfect lines and shaky curves in there that would usually get the axe, so that’s an improvement.

Next year’s edition of Cathtober will entail more rules and constraints to prevent my inner Art Director from making me work overtime.

You can see all the illustrations created for this project here.

Hoping the world won’t have slipped into even more of a dystopian nightmare by the time I write the December Update,

Take care.

Cath