Blank-Tober: Make Your Own October Drawing Challenge

You've probably heard of Inktober, the October ink-drawing challenge started in 2009 by Jake Paul, and there's a good chance you've heard of some of the dozens of alternatives that have sprung up since the introduction of Inktober, like Drawtober, Peachtober, OC-tober, and others. All of these challenges revolve around a central idea: draw something every day for a month to establish a regular art practice, hone your skills, and maybe get som social media clout in the process.

I've done Inktober a handful of times and participated in a few other spin-off challenges. It's a great idea - the social media aspect creates a layer of accountability that might be challenging for some artists to replicate during an unaffiliated month, motivating you to really keep pushing through the full 31 days. Having a pre-written list of prompts takes some of the cognitive labor out of the process, since it gives you a place to start with your drawing. And a daily practice in general is a really excellent way to exercise your artistic muscles without feeling like you have to be making progress on some grandiose project.

I just have one problem with these challenges: Someone else is in charge of the prompts. Obviously this is something that works for thousands of artists, so I don't mean to disparage the many wonderful people creating prompt lists. Frankly I have a hard time with lots of prompt-based challenges, not just the ones in October. I find writing prompts often give too much context to start from, stifling my creativity. But with the most common types of blank-tober lists, I find that the prompts are too short to trigger my imagination to any really stimulating ideas for a drawing. With a daily challenge, I want the "think of what to draw" part to be as quick and interesting as possible, so I can get right to the art-making itself.

DIY Daily Art Challenge

This year, I decided to solve that problem. Instead of complaining about other peoples lists, or starting a challenge and dropping it after a week, I decided to make my own prompt list. I love gatekeeping, so I've hidden it from my socials, although I did share it with a few art clubs I'm in. Before I show you my prompts and work, I want to walk you through some steps to come up with your own challenge, in case you've found yourself feeling bored or uninterested with the popular challenges.

Step 1: Define the challenge scope

The first thing to do is to set a clear scope for the challenge. This means figuring out what exactly you want your month to look like. Ask yourself these questions:

• How often do I want to draw?
• What skills do I want to focus on?
• Is there a specific subject matter or theme I want to focus on?
• How finished is finished for a prompt When writing up the answers to these question, make sure to keep in mind all the other responsibilities you have. You still have to do things like going to work and washing dishes, so don't forget that and lock yourself in to spending 4 hours on a watercolor painting every day. The challenge can feel like a bit of a stretch, but it shouldn't be totally exhausting. You want to come out of the month pleasantly surprised with your output and excited to draw more, not totally burnt out.

Step 2: Create the prompts

Check out some of the other challenges I've shared and figure out what you like and don't like about their prompts. Inktober is usually just a randomly generated list of one-word prompts. Other prompt lists have themes, like the names of cryptids or more elaborate exercises to help with the development of longterm creative projects, like OC-tober for character development and World-tober for worldbuilding. For me, the one-word prompts were too short so I used a random word generator to make a list of random adjective and noun pairings, and re-generated any prompts that didn't immediately spark an interesting or funny vision when I read them. I want the ideas part to be easy.

Step 3: Profit (not guaranteed)

You can do the challenge totally alone without telling anyone, but it's a bit more fun to have friends in on it, even if they're just cheering you on. Make a graphic with all your prompts, preferably one you can print and hang at your workspace so you don't have to look up prompts when you sit down to draw. make a fun name for your challenge - I went basic and called mine "comic-tober" because I wanted to draw a comic page every day. Share your prompt-list and challenge guidelines with your fellow artists, and start drawing! If you want to go big you can make a hashtag to share your work, or keep it small with a groupchat or a discord channel to share your work. Enjoy the practice, have fun, and don't take yourself too seriously.

House of Lief's Comic-Tober Challenge

Now that you've sat through everything else, here's the prompt list I made. After I do some clean up, I'll be sharing the comics I drew for this challenge on my webcomic or as a zine.