SO WHAT IS
“DON’T INK TWICE”
ANYWAYS?
How ‘Don’t Ink Twice’ Got Started
‘Don’t Ink Twice’ began as an addendumized rule for the popular daily-art challenge ‘Inktober’ that EPZ379 had been participating in since 2018.
The Inktober challenge itself follows a fairly simple process: Each day for the month of October, there is a different word associated to that day that you use as a prompt to make a piece of artwork using Ink as the primary medium, which is how the name “Inktober” came to be.
EPZ wanted to showcase how he made his illustrations from start to finish, so he recorded timelapses of his work not only for documentation but also as a showcase of his creative processes.
There have been many different iterations of Inktober over the years; some focus on genres or topics to focus on, while others use particular objects as the base of inspiration for the works, and the works themselves aren’t bound to drawings or Illustrations, either.
Photography, Videography, Graphic Design, Music Creation, Scriptwriting; anything in the creative spaces can be used as part of these daily challenges if the artists in question set their mind to it.
Finding An Additional Challenge
The List of Prompts for Inktober is available nearly a whole month before the event properly begins at the start of October, giving participants enough time plan their illustrations.
In 2020, EPZ began employing a rule to his own method of illustrations within Inktober. There was an additional thrill to the idea that there was some secret behind what the next word would be, so he would intentionally not look at the list ahead of time and would only look at the word when it was time to sit down and draw for that particular day.
“Why?” got asked a lot when others heard about rule EPZ placed on himself. The main reason EPZ liked using this rule and has kept doing it for the last 3 years was to build on two important skills every creative should know and work on:
Quick Inspiration and
Creative Improvisation.
Being able to come up with an idea quickly is one thing, but being able to conceptualize something based off of something else or by the request of someone else is critical; EPZ knows this as someone who works in Broadcast Multimedia Production with a focus on Advertising Design.
‘Don’t Ink Twice’ is an explorational type of daily-art challenge that is meant to test one’s abilities in addendum to other challenges, not as an overall replacement. The prompts used for this challenge is based on a list made by a friend of EPZ’s and, in turn, is not based on another list from another challenge to ensure EPZ stands by the idea of going in completely blind to the words being provided. However, if another artistically included individual wanted to use a list from another daily-art challenge, but add the additional hurdle of ‘Don’t Ink Twice’ to the mix, that’s all find and dandy!
Why Does EPZ Have So Many Sharpies?
The reason EPZ uses Sharpies for his adventures of Inktober and now with Don’t Ink Twice was down to “ease of entry” when it came to doing these Daily Art challenges. There were a lot of people in the early stages of Inktober that toted the idea that you needed to use the “proper tools” or who showcased their drawing materials that seemed more like bragging about their setup when it came to these challenges; it felt restrictive for those who might not have those materials.
So, EPZ wanted to showcase that you didn’t need anything fancy to draw along with these challenges; you could use something as easily accessible as a Sharpie and find all sorts of ways to use that tool for these daily drawing adventures!