On the first day of October, people from across the globe gather their pens and ink to begin drawing and posting their work for others to see. Over the course of a month, they will make a new piece everyday to push their creativity and skills to hopefully see improvement in their abilities.  

This event is Inktober, an art event that was started in 2009 as a way to improve artistic skills such as inking, and it has grown in popularity ever since its creation. The challenge is also put into place to inspire creativity and get people out of their artistic comfort zone

“Inktober started on Instagram years ago, and the purpose of it is to simply have a  prompt and then encourage artists to just use pen and ink to draw something that comes to their mind,” art teacher Shea Phillips said. 

This year, the art club joined the challenge once again but with a bit of a twist. Instead of each member attempting 31 individual drawings, the club has assigned each member with two prompts, one they picked and the other they were assigned randomly, to complete. 

The prompts are random words with no connection and can range from “crystal” to “sour” to “extinct.” Of course, there are many different prompt lists, but the club has gone with the official prompt list. 

“Every year the Inktober creator puts out a new list so it’s always something new,” Phillips said. “It’s really just a creative exercise to help artists just do the work, be creative everyday and celebrate the month of October and all the fun stuff that goes along with that.”

With prompts in hand, art club students completed the challenge and  their pieces.

One of the biggest aspects for the challenge is creativity, and that has prompted many students to do their work with a twist. Inktober, while the official prompt list, has sparked the creation of a few others that some students have taken inspiration from. 

“A lot of times kids will kinda take a gory twist and that prompts Goretober,” Phillips said. “A lot of our students are doing Goretober which is basically Inktober with a gore twist.”

At the end of the month, members got to see each other’s work and see how they used their prompts to illustrate a unique, individual piece in a way no one else has, which is what the event is all about. 

“[I enjoy] the creative drawings that come out of it and [seeing] how people interpret things differently,’ sophomore Tricia Slifer said.