Digital Inktober 2017

Inktober 2017

For years I wanted to take part in Inktober but I never got round to actually giving it a try properly. However this year I wanted to try and create some digital designs for Inktober, although Inkober is for ink drawing and traditional methods I wanted to showcase my designs on Instagram whilst keeping my Instagram feed consistent, so jokingly I decided to call it 'I can't do ink drawing so i'll do digital instead-tober'. This blog post will be showcasing all of my designs that I create for this 31 day project.

The official prompt list is to help those who get a creative block during this project, I might follow this prompt list in order to challenge myself in creating designs that link to them. Below is the official list for 2017.

Day 1-31 

For the first day the prompt was swift. Looking at what other people had designed for this day, I wanted to come up with something a little different in comparison. What I decided to do for this one is design a missile that had really low poly smoke and flame trailing off of it. Additionally I added the depth effect which I discussed about in my 'Progression of my art Style' post adding a very simple yet effective 3 dimensional feel to it.   

Day 2-31 

The prompt for the second day was the word Divided. For this I wanted to work with my skull design and have it divided into pieces with the inside showing the striped pattern which is usually used on one of the skull's eye. What's interesting is that the stripes give the inside of the skull a television static impression when staring at the design.

Day 3-31

For the third day the prompt was poison. I was a little bit at a stand still with ideas on what I could design for this, looking on Instagram it was a very popular idea to draw a potion vial/flask indicated as poison, but I was reluctant to do the same idea as everyone else. I finally came up with the idea of a cybernetic plague doctor/ gas mask hybrid as my design for this prompt.

Day 4-31

Day 4 had the prompt Underwater. For this I decided to design a sea mine just so I could make the joke "you've heard of bad puns, wait until you sea mine"... This design was a bit more circular than what I would usually create, yet I kept the rule of my style which is no curved lines within the design process of this.

Day 5-31

For the 5th prompt of 'Long', I actually fell behind on Inktober due to placing primary focus on my university work. For this prompt I decided to do a design of my Nythim character as a form of character development. I added the description "long as in long overdue" to make a link towards the list. At this point however I decided to branch off from the prompt list to help free my creative block from specific words such as 'long'. 

Day 6-31

Sword was another prompt that I branched off from because I wanted to design a futuristic motorcycle instead, reasoning behind this is due to wanting to experiment with designing futuristic vehicles to practice with different angles and perspectives.

Day 7-31

For the 7th day the prompt was the word shy. For this I decided to create a fan art piece of the shy guy character from Nintendo's 'Super Mario' franchise. I chose to do the sub-style of my design where half of the character only has a ghost outline present.  

Day 8-31

For day 8 the prompt was crooked. For this I wanted to work with my skull again to create a distorted design. The outcome had a bit more of a glitch impression however.

Day 9-31

For today's prompt of screech I created possibly the best design i have made to this day. I had tonnes of fun creating this piece, inspired by a video game enemy from Halo 4 I created a skull screaming as my Nythim skull helmet splits open. Below is a GIF of the Halo 4 Character alongside the piece inspired by it. 

Day 10-31

Due to a deadlines I had to put a slight hold on the Inktober project, as I type this now It's currently early November and I have a lot of catching up to do in regards to this project. For this piece I decided to steer away from the prompt and create some fan art of the character Space core from the portal game series.

Day 11-31 

From here onward I decided not to follow the Inktober prompts, either because of creative blocks trying to come up with designs that relate to the daily word or coming up with better ideas. For today's prompt I created a Ghost which is a character in Bungie's 'Destiny' franchise.

Day 12-31 

When it comes to guns i'm not particularly a fan of them in the real world however saying that there are certain guns that I do like the look of due to them having a futuristic appeal. One such gun is the FN P90 which is a gun that is commonly featured in cyberpunk and has this sleek and curved body and a really interesting magazine that i personally love. Below is a design I did of a P90. This piece is one of my most favourite designs from this project.

 Day 13-31 

For Day 13 i created a design that was different from my art style, this primarily created on photoshop and then edited on illustrator. Using a robotic hand that had the middle finger gesture I turned it into a bitmap. This style was something I experimented with for my Pathetic Aesthetic magazine prototype in the first year of uni. 

Day 14-31

For the 14th day I created the helmet/head of an anime character called 'Alphonse Elric' from Full Metal Alchemist. This character in particular was quite a frequently requested design and i'm glad how it turned out. Additionally it was requested to create some stickers of this design and i have considered it.

Day 15-31


For day 15 I created one of my favourite fictional Sci-fi guns, the dominator. This gun is from an anime series called 'Psycho Pass' and has a really blocky futuristic look to it. Making the design look 3d was rather difficult for this one, the gun in the series opens up when activated and getting the gun to look open and 3d at the same time took a lot of experimenting with darker greys to create shadows. The outcome turned out rather well for this.

Day 16-31

On the 16th day i went on a bit of a marvel movie marathon watching them in chronological order which was fun! during this i though it would be fitting to create something marvel themed and I thought the Iron man helmet would be a great candidate for this. 

Day 17-31

I absolutely love Star Wars, so it was about time I created something Star Wars related in my art style. One thing in particular that I like from star wars are the clone troopers and the storm troopers, I love their helmets. So for day 17 I created a phase 2 clone trooper piece. 

Day 18-31

Another day, another gun. For day 18 I created a design of the MA5B assault rifle from the game Halo 1. Halo was my childhood and the gun is iconic from the ammo indicator to the beefy sound it made when shot. 

Day 19-31 

On the 19th day I was watching a show called 'Space Dandy' which inspired me to do a design of one of the characters from it called QT ('cutie'... geddit?). QT is a little robot who has extendable arms and rolls around on wheels and i thought he'd look really cool in my art style. At first I had slight difficulty with his visor and making it look right but in the end I was able to resolve it. (starting to sound like I don't actually do university work!) 

Day 20-31

For day 20 I returned to an incomplete piece which was the APC from the Aliens movie, i personally didn't think this awesome vehicle got enough screen time! packing so much heat and not a single casing was spent on an alien, shame.

Day 21-31

Back at it again with the future guns! Another iconic weapon is the bolter from games workshop's Warhammer 40k series, this gun shot huge explosive rounds, what's not to like! 

Day 22-31

It had been a few days since I had done a design with my skull. This time i wanted to do something a little different, first I did a top down angle and decided to incorporate some slight details from my previous skull designs such as a panel popped off and you can see a static like inside. Along side that I wanted to experiment with the 'ring' a bit, instead of doing my usual adding a circle and cutting a piece out to give a 3d effect, I made a wavy path that intertwines through and around the skull, i then used the direct select tool to adjust the thickness of certain parts of the path giving this random twisted look which I thought look rather decent!    

Day 23-31

I'm not a massive fan of the Legend of Zelda series but along side a couple of others, the hylian shield was one of my most requested items to design in my art style. Originally I was going to add the master sword behind the shield but i felt like it cluttered the design too much.

Day 24-31 

Like the P90, another gun that i like the look of is the VECTOR KRISS smg. This is another real world gun that is commonly used in futuristic and cyberpunk movies, games and designs and I personally like it's design. For this I used the idea to twist the path like i did with the skull before to create a wavy circle wrapping round the gun. 

Day 25-31

For day 25 I returned to Star Wars and created a design of the head of a CIS B1 battle droid. growing up I always enjoyed watching these guys unload from the troop carriers in Phantom Menace. 

Day 26-31

For the next 3 days I decided to create a set of three designs that can be considered as eye candy lewd. I wanted to experiment with glitching using Photoshop and then using the image trace tool on illustrator to create these glitchy vector shapes combined with lewd designs to create and glitchy aesthetic set simply titled 'Consume' the font used for the consume is actually a slightly edited Supreme font I thought it would be a nice touch. These designs became extremely well received so much so i have made and sold a couple of prints of them and they have been heavily requested to become stickers. 

Day 27-31

Out of the three designs for this set, this was the most popular. I think it might be the pose and angle that made it so popular.

Day 28-31

This design was my favourite of the set i found the outcome of this to be better than the other two because of the angle of the design combined with the additional 'Camera Record' features unique to this design (not to sound perverse there)

Day 29-31

For the final three designs for this month I wanted to do something car themed due to it being an uncommon design choice of mine. I took inspiration from a series called Initial D which heavily focuses on cars racing and drifting. Each car is first image traced and then I created a TV scan line fill effect on Photoshop to overlay the car design which was then image traced again to create the design, I then added a black band over the top and added the title. These three designs looked really good lined up on my Instagram feed and had received good feedback.

Toyota AE89

Day 30-31

Mazda RX7

Day 31-31

Nissan GTR

And this completes my Digital Inktober project, although I ran through a couple of bumps through the duration of this trying such as to juggle this with my university work, I definitely enjoyed creating pieces nearly every day and developing my skills on primarily Adobe Illustrator. I eagerly await 2018 so I can give it another crack but actually do it traditionally in a sketchbook and document my progress with that on Instagram and possibly on here!