Thinking of inking ✒️

October has arrived and so has Inktober. If you aren't familiar with Inktober, you can visit inktober.com to learn more. In short, inktober is a challenge for artists to draw with ink every day of October. Underdrawings are allowed before inking. Or you could just straight up ink. The larger idea was for artists to get discovered on social media. They would use tagging things like hastags or other social media tagging tools for algorithms to recommend their work for the challenge. The idea of Inktober being to learn better daily inking drawing practice. I want to do it really bad, but I struggle. Not with drawing everyday, but with life getting in my way.

Don't get me wrong, I draw everyday. I keep up this daily practice. I have been since 2019. I won't stop. But I do want to get into ink more. When I do some ink drawings, I will be sure to include images near the bottom of this blog post. In all honesty, I don't want to do it for the month of October only. I want this to be a thing I do everyday. Maybe just to practice my daily drawing even. Maybe once I can make some stuff that I am proud of, I would share it via an Inktober hashtag. Not even sure if hashtag is appropriate anymore. I haven't used any social media for my art besides for YouTube. My skills are still greatly lacking. But I am dead set on getting better.

As of now, twitter.com has become x.com instead. I also have heard of artists jumping ship off instagram because of artificial intelligence models being used to train their algorithm. But many of these platforms have a market. A bunch of other artists related websites have followed with the training as well. Sometimes it feels like too many platforms. I just want to make art and share it once. Not on all of these platforms. In my work job, I help manage social media posts using an online service called Sprout. It basically allows you to connect many social accounts to it to then schedule posts all at once. More for marketing purposes than friendly engagement. Has it become absurd? We make content for so many platforms. Marketing has truly become saturated. I remember the old days in which it was more oriented through website banner advertisements.

A lot of these platforms prioritize you sharing content on their platform. Not linking to your website. I suggest you maintain your own website to archive your artwork you want to share. It often seems that the world has become keen on getting people to share work for the purpose of serving ads. The problem is the same with our media as a greater whole. In the old days, we had websites like LiveLeak. Lots of these websites would should stuff other media was too afraid to show. Artists these days appear to going through similar struggles. Has social media sanitized art? If your art isn't friendly enough for advertisements, can you share it with the world? Can the struggles of the day be known? Or is your art not family friendly enough.

Should art challenge or question the status quo? Can website operators keep a website alive without larger name advertisers? Are most people viewing a fake art world? Have we become stuck in a stagnant loop of art?

I don't like to get political, but when I was growing up I learned a lot American political cartoons. These newspaper cartoons shook the core of those who they were about. You will often find these nowadays within The New Yorker. Maybe you will see my cartooning in it one day. Or perhaps never, that works for me as well.

I believe people greatly underestimate the power of ink. It just doesn't stick to paper, but to the minds of people as well.

About Lars Barnabee 🐝 hey that's me