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To be blunt, October has been a month of failure. I’m glad to see it gone. Pretty much all my plans fell apart, and I accomplished very little. Read on, if you’d like to see a detailed post-mortem of the tenth month of 2015.

The 80in80 sketchbook project died in flight. October is also “#Inktober” and a nice time to show off ink drawings over the course of the month. There’s also a lesser known hashtag “Drawlloween,” that focuses on Halloween related images. I linked them up and planned to do ink drawings of the Drawlloween as my Inktober subjects.

As promised, here’s the results of the sixth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 36-42, drawn Sep 14-20.

Here’s the drawings from this past week. (I’m a couple days late on this one, sorry.)

As promised, here’s the results of the fifth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 29-35, drawn Sep 7-13.

Here’s the drawings from this past week. (I’m back-dating this post because I totally forgot to keep the weekly posts updated!)

So I’ve been doing a daily drawing for thirty days now. I posted the 30th last night.

[instagram url=https://instagram.com/p/7ZxX6nBZzt/]

That’s thirty down and fifty(!) to go for those keeping track.

I’ve posted each one to Instagram, and I’ve managed to not miss a day. There’s been a few days when I really didn’t want to open up the pens. But I did anyway. The drawing might have been simpler than I would’ve liked, but I got it done.

As promised, here’s the results of the fourth week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 22-28, drawn Aug 31-Sep 6.

Almost half done!

This week I experimented with a Rotring ArtPen. It’s a quill pen styled fountain pen that handles well. But I found it’s line is a bit thick. For an extra fine tip, the line is the same as my #1 (0.5mm) Rapidograph, and using the back of the nib is still thicker than the #0 (0.35) Rapidograph. For a lot of the thin crosshatching, that’s still too thick. I really wanted to like it, as I have some doubts about how well Rapidographs will take being carted around in a pen case. So I sent it back to Amazon.

As promised, here’s the results of the third week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 15-21, drawn Aug 24-30.

As promised, here’s the results of the second week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 8-14, drawn Aug 17-23.

As promised, here’s the results of the first week of my 80 Drawings in 80 Days challenge. This covers pages 1-7, drawn Aug 10-16.

A new sketchbook is a wondrous thing to behold. And slightly intimidating.

— me

Yesterday I picked up a new sketchbook, and decided to do a couple of things with it.

<li>First, I wanted to make it into a personal challenge sketchbook. So when its pages are filled, it will be a specific record of a time in my life.</li>

<li>Second, it needed to be self-contained so that I could pick it up and go without having to look for my pens and pencils.</li>

The first one was easy. I just had to set a few rules for myself. The second involved a bit of sewing to make a pen holster for the sketchbook cover.

Just a quick update: I’ve added an art supplies page listing the stuff I use and like. Check it out!