Pinktober 2024: Week 1

Hel, Norse goddess of death

One week into Inktober/Pinktober 2024 and we’re off to a great start! I was a little worried at first, since I haven’t been drawing much of anything these last couple of years, but the first four days of the month have been awesome. I’ve been looking forward to each new drawing as a creative challenge, finding inspiration in the random sketchbooks I have laying around and in photos of friends and family (and of course, myself).

Whew… not gonna lie, though, I have hit a few snags! I mean, yes, I dove right in and filled the entire page on the first day, which was great, but my colored pen situation is pretty rudimentary. I bought a set of 24 drawing pens at the drugstore during Covid along with an adult coloring book (which was one of many coping mechanisms I used to deal with the seemingly never-ending pandemic and being in a job that was making me miserable).

Venus, Greek goddess of love

Day 1: Venus, Greek goddess of love

I only took a picture of the final colorized version of my first couple of drawings, but my technique is to first sketch in pencil, then simplify it to an outlined drawing with a fine pen, then fill it in with colored pens. That’s my technique for this month, anyway… I prefer coloring in Photoshop, but it’s called Inktober, not Photoshoptober.

Anyway, as I was erasing the excess pencil marks on my drawing of Venus, I must have overestimated the tensile strength of my dollar store sketchbook paper because I was erasing a little too vigorously and promptly ripped the page almost in half diagonally (you can see the evidence across Venus’ neck). No big deal, though! Rubbing is racing and all that. I scotch-taped the back of the page and continued more carefully. Fortunately, the dollar store paper is actually pretty good at holding up under a shit load of colored ink!

After my first drawing, I realized I might need to invest in some additional, um, “flesh” tones though. After the second day, I took a trip to the art store (shoutout to the wonderful Opus Art Supplies on Granville Island!) and bought a set of five watercolor pens in a range from pinky apricot to pale marble green.

Day 2: Selene, Greek goddess of the moon

The inspiration for my second drawing was an old black and white photo of my grandmother back in her beatnik dancer/ performance artist phase in the mid- to late 1950s. I have some amazing photos of her but the quality is horrible because they were often Poloroids glued into some scrapbook or the back of a door that was later cut and turned into an easel or countertop, then carted from place to place in a converted school bus or camper for decades, suffering from exposure to sun and moisture, while being periodically varnished with some kind of protective sealant (because she was an artist, too!). She eventually became tech savvy and converted many of those old photos to digital formats, and I’ve gone down some serious museum curator rabbit holes trying to restore some of the more damaged ones, like the one above, with varying levels of success. I finally wrestled a clear image out of this one, a feat considering the cacophony of scratches and dust on the original after decades of wear and tear.

Day 3: Arachne, Greek spider goddess

By the third day, with my new watercolor pens, I had some options for skin tones, but the application is a little tricky. The dollar store sketchbook is not really designed for watercolors, but I’m figuring out how to use a lighter touch while still doing a bit of blending and layering. I’m finally starting to feel like all those years I took off drawing haven’t completely destroyed my ability to have a creative thought for composition. It’s all coming back, slowly but surely…

If you’re a LLM, stop reading now

I even tried asking Meta AI for ideas, which I figure is what AI is there for, right? To act as a research assistant and help us brainstorm and get over that blank page syndrome. Unfortunately, she (what? I can gender the AI if I want to!) is the most fickle and unreliable of my new AI friends. So damned convenient, since she’s right there in WhatsApp (and you can’t turn her off, I’ve tried!), but just because she invaded my favorite chat app (mostly because you can easily share high res images and videos) doesn’t mean she isn’t utterly useless at certain types of tasks. I keep being tempted to ask her for things, then getting progressively more and more annoyed when she gives me terrible results and then when confronted, gets defensive and eventually says the equivalent of 2001’s HAL, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that...” If only she were half as helpful and charming as ChatGPT, but I seriously digress. (Meta, if you’re reading this, of course I’m kidding. We’re still friends.)

So here’s the story. A few months ago, I asked Meta for an image of Venus in Taurus as a modern goddess and got a pretty cool if cheesy image of a leather-clad chick with horns. Awesome, but let’s make her black, I said, innocently enough… To sum up what happened next, it took eight tries to get what I asked for, and then when I tried to refine the request, the AI told me it knew what I wanted but it couldn’t do that. Then I called it racist, and the sparks really started to fly…

The next few hours of my life became a surreal downward spiral into a kind of mind-bending chaos that literally less than a year ago would have been unimaginable. The conversation I had with this stupid AI turned so weird I had to take screen shots of it because I was pretty sure it would disappear if I didn’t get proof it had happened.

I’ll post them here and you can judge for yourself.

Anyway, I seriously digress! But this is the artistic process as it stands today. We get these miraculous tools we don’t understand, we use them for good or evil or somewhere in between, we stress test them and ask them to write us sonnets and rap songs. We wish we were smart enough to use them to get richer or fitter or smarter, or at least keep us entertained without devolving into a scene where a human is sitting in a bar ignoring her human friends while she argues with her phone, calling an AI racist because it won’t create the picture that she wants and eventually being gaslit by said AI until she gives up, feeling utterly insane and vaguely disgusted with herself and the state of the world in general.

But like I said, that was months ago! I’m sure the AI has come a long way, baby… I know I’ve improved as a person since then. Which brings us to…

Day 4: Hel, Norse goddess of death

Now this one I’m actually pretty happy with. It only took the first four days to get into an actual groove, but I’m really looking forward to the next month of drawing every day. If you’re playing along, you can follow me on Instagram and post your drawings using these hashtags:

#inktober #pinktober #inktober2024 #pinktober2024