I decided to do the Inktober challenge again this year.

Over the past few years, I had come to notice artists making beautiful sketches under the Inktober challenge. If you have not heard about it,  Inktober is an art challenge created in 2009 by Illustrator Jake Parker for himself to improve his inking skills and develop positive drawing habits. The rules stated by the creator are simple. For each day of month October, make a drawing in ink and post it(Post it on any social media account or even just on your refrigerator he says. The point is to share your art with someone.)

While Jake himself publishes a prompt of an English word for each day, today there are multiple other popular prompts and also individual artists prompting themselves. Since its start, millions of ink sketches have been posted on different social media under the #inktober tag. A year-long version of the challenge with a drawing every week has also been introduced. After all, anyone can draw!

I decided to jump on the bandwagon for similar reasons Jake started it himself.

While drawing and painting have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, I wanted to be more serious about developing my skill and finding diligent time for it along with my professional and personal responsibilities. While still being not so confident of seeing it through, last year I went ahead, created an Instagram account, and took the plunge! What awaited was much beyond my initial expectations and art for art's sake.

It made me a better Data Scientist.

Scientific writing is a skill one acquires being a researcher. As a Data Scientist, one additionally requires the communication skill to convey proposals and findings to a varied audience such as business decision-makers, technical experts in different areas, or product designers. A daily prompt makes you do the same at different stages of drawing.

One traverses through multiple meanings a word could take, like a researcher exploring and forming varied hypothesis.

In either case, the more creative and informed one is, the better the final result is.

Further, the Inktober challenge is a peek into the world of a professional artist such as an Illustrator or Graphic Designer. Unlike an abstract oil painting, the creator conveys their idea with precision, clarity, and simplicity that a flowchart or a heat map does in a design document. In both cases, it is required to mitigate ambiguity in conveying an idea through a visual representation while keeping the audience in mind.

It became a constructive outlet for thoughts.

The first thing one observes in themselves when drawing is the dissolving of language as expression. One opens the brain to think non analytically and observe visual details of the subject more intrinsically. This detailing reflected in the way I was invested in the topics of my drawings. With the added context of posting my viewpoint on social media, fact-checking became stringent along with educating myself on each of those topics.

The other transition was that, as the confidence in putting my art out there grew, it became more reflective of things I wanted to talk about. Mental health and environment became central to most of my drawings.

I learned, to find 30 minutes a day to exercise creativity.

Throughout October 2019, between my not so nine to five full-time job, preparing and doing my largest public talk yet, and planing my dad's retirement party, I stuck to the plan. I completed 31 drawings by the end of October.

Finding time to indulge in a hobby on a daily basis, bought more than just pleasure. It was also about exploring the fluidity of the mind, pushing it each day, solving a different puzzle. An element that had bought me into pursuing engineering in the first place but does not necessarily come by so evidently in daily work.

I stuck to the habit and found that time for myself at least once every week through out the year.

And of course, improving my drawing skill.

As with any practice, the time put in has let me improve my skills as an artist and experiment with new techniques. I started mixing different mediums in my art. I also started attending anatomy drawing sessions on Sundays and got to meet and learn from many professional artists!

So this splash of creativity is a habit I plan to keep as I have opened my mind and is halfway through the new set of prompts for this year :)

P.S. Please note that all the observations noted here are personal experiences of the author and not concluded through empirical studies.

EDIT: Adding my drawings from Inktober 2020 challenge here.