Hello all,

It's once again October and it's time for all of the monthly drawing challenges including Inktober, and I'm once again going to participate in one. Mine will be largely the same as the usual Inktober, but with my own prompt list and a focus on the things I want to improve at.

So expect (hopefully) daily uploads of what I make along with some of my commission backlog as I finish typing out descriptions. The rest of this post will be me talking about Inktober, my plans for it, etc... so if you're just here to look at art then you might not be interested and you can stop reading here. I won't be offended. :p

EDIT 2025-10-01: Oh yeah, I'm going to tag everything with "inktober2025". This means you should be able to find all of my inktober posts with the search query "@keywords inktober 2025 \@lower simmplicity (without the \ in front of the lower - it'll make it a username link if I don't escape it but it still shows the escape character TwT)

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I went back and re-read my inktober 2024 post to get some notes on where I struggled the most and what helped. The most important thing for me was keeping the drawings interesting. It was such a struggle that I eventually threw out the prompts entirely in favor of drawing absols. So this year I'll be doing a prompt list entirely my own! I'll not post it here since it's personal to me (a mix of song titles, Pokemon, fetishes, etc) but everything is something I have some interest in drawing.

Along with that, I have two primary goals this October:
* Get better at finishing pieces (not just a sketch but doing clean lineart)
* Improve my technique and comfort with a digital pen
My sketching has improved a lot in the last year, but usually my lineart loses a lot of the magic that the sketch had. I'd like to resolve that so that I have more desire to see things through. To help me save time and remain focused, I've tried to make some guidelines for myself:
* Create one piece per day.
** Pieces do not have to follow the prompts - those are just there as jumping-off points.
* Create digitally, on a greyscale canvas, using one of the 3 brushes I've tagged for Inktober.
** If I can't do it digitally, pen and ink is acceptable.
* Consider it finished and ready when it is inked.
* Post it daily.
* Try to use hatching, line weight, and solid blocks of value more than airbrush.
* Spend 3-6 minutes warming up.
* Spend 5-10 minutes making 3-5 thumbnail sketches.

Last year's Inktober was genuinely one of the best things I've done for my art. I am greatly looking forward to this year's.