It's the Middle of #Inktober. Do You Know Where Your Art Pens Are?
Here we are. October 15th. Halfway.
If you started Inktober on the first with a fresh sketchbook and a beautiful new set of pens, you are now in one of three places. You're ahead (bless you). You're right on schedule (who are you?). Or you're somewhere around Day 6, staring at the word Ogre and wondering where it all went wrong.
Just to be clear: all three are perfectly valid ways to do October.
I say this as someone who has made it all the way through Inktober exactly once. Once. It was fun. It was also hard. (Both things can be true at once. Inktober almost insists on it.)
Wait -- what is Inktober?
In 2009, illustrator Jake Parker set himself a challenge: one ink drawing every day in October, to sharpen his inking and build better drawing habits. That was it. That was the whole plan.
It got a little out of hand.
By October 2015, more than a million Inktober drawings had been posted to Instagram. Since 2016 there's been an official list of 31 one-word prompts, released early so artists can spend September sketching out ideas (or, as one does, ignore September entirely and panic on the first).
The rules are disarmingly simple. Draw in ink (pencil underneath is fine). Share it. Tag it. Keep going. There's even a ‘half-marathon’ route, drawing every other day, and a ‘5K’ route, once a week. Consistency, the official line goes, matters more than frequency.
I find that enormously comforting. I hope you do too.
Today's prompt is Hooray
I mean that literally. Day 15 of the 2026 list is Hooray.
Which feels like a little gift from the universe at the halfway mark. Then again, this is the same list that handed us Smack on Day 5 and Stinky on Day 8, so the universe is, shall we say, mercurial.
Still to come: Contraption. Dapper. Tusk. And on Day 27, simply, Dumb. (Yeah, I have no notes. I'm just excited.)
The whole thing wraps up on Day 31 with Flex, which is exactly the right energy for anyone who makes it that far.
October has range
Inktober isn't the only party in town, though. Not even close.
Artists have spun off October challenges for practically every corner of the imagination. Witchtober for witches. Gobtober for goblins (yes, really). Ghostober, Pumpkintober, Monstober, and Catober, which is exactly what you think it is: perfect. There's Drawlloween, if you like your prompts properly spooky, and Peachtober, run by illustrator Sha'an d'Anthes, who releases her prompts each September so artists can plan ahead.
Some challenges go darker still. I'll let you find Goretober on your own. Brr. Not for me.
And then there's Pinktober.
Expect lots of Barbie.
Maybe?
A small, pink aside
In 2019, the Inktober name was trademarked, and some artists who sold work made during the challenge received cease-and-desist letters. Artists were, to put it gently, unimpressed.
Enter our friend Stuart ‘The Pinkest Pink’ Semple, who we’ve written about before, the British artist who once released the “world's pinkest pink” pigment to everyone on earth except Anish Kapoor. Ipso facto, buyers had to confirm they were not Anish Kapoor, not affiliated with Anish Kapoor, and not buying on his behalf. (Kapoor had secured exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, the famously blackest black and Semple took that personally.)
In 2020, Semple launched #Pinktober -- free, no restrictions, and open to every artist but one.
He has a type.
The very first prompt was greedy.
I've written before about a corporation trying to own a colour, so you can imagine how I felt reading that. (Delighted. I felt delighted.)
Nobody gets to own magenta.
And nobody gets to own October.
But, you know, people make mistakes.
It was a mistake.
Let’s move on.
Falling behind
Ah, that time-honoured rite of having a life!
First of all, behinders, welcome. There are snacks.
Second, you have options. (And it's more than ink, pens, or coloured markers!) You can pick up today's prompt à la nothing to see here -- the every-other-day and once-a-week routes that exist mean you're well within bounds, so chin up!
You can fold two prompts into one drawing. (Flimsy and Lady, Days 13 and 14, are practically begging for it! Think how flimsy a skeleton in Vera Wang would be.) Alternatively, you can choose the one prompt you love most and spend the rest of the month with it.
Betcha that would look snazzy by the end!
None of these methods are considered cheating. Inktober was built to grow a habit, not to grade tardiness.
And if your pens have gone dry -- or vanished entirely, as pens are known to do in October -- any ink counts. Ballpoint. Brush pen. Acrylic pen. Watercolour pen. That pen from the bank on the little chain.
(Ahem. Return that pen to the bank.)
To take a page from comic books, if you can ink with it, it counts.
Why any of this matters
Here's the thing.
Underneath the prompts and the hashtags and the frankly heroic amount of ink, every one of these challenges is the same idea. Show up. Make something. Do it again tomorrow.
That’s the fire in which artists are forged. It’s not often a thunderclap of genius, but a stack of sketchbook pages nobody was ever meant to see that builds the muscle. Some of those drawings are wonderful. Some of them are Day 8: Stinky.
But all of them count.
I firmly believe it's from those stacks that, eventually, the work collectors fall in love with emerges.
Mark your calendar: October 25th
One more October occasion before I let you get back to your pens.
October 25th is International Artist Day, founded around 2004 by Canadian painter Chris MacClure to honour the contributions artists make to society. (It's also Picasso's birthday, which I choose to believe is coincidence. Yikes.)
If you're a collector, it's a lovely day to tell an artist their work matters to you. If you want to really make their week, buy something. We at Studio Eclipse would never discourage that.
And if you're an artist and you're behind on Inktober, remember...
You're not behind.
You’re showing up.
You're still drawing.
That's the whole (sharpened) point.
P.S. If you'd like to ask about the available pieces with the actual artists, click to message us at Eclipse Art Auctions on Facebook!
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