With November around the corner, Inktober — an initiative to sketch every day — comes to end. But the creativity it sparks continues to inspire and motivate new artists.
Walk into Brigham Young University’s fine arts center, take the stairs down a floor, and enter a code into the door on your right, and you’ll find one of the animation labs. Aspiring animators join BYU’s top-ranked program to learn how to bring stories to life, which includes sketching the characters that make it possible.
In October, animators look forward to a yearly source of inspiration: Inktober. Created by BYU alum Jake Parker in 2009, Inktober has become an international initiative that gets people drawing.
With daily prompts like fish, hope, slippery and dune, minds wander as ink hits the paper. The word “shoes” can turn into a dog in protective gear, and the word “ominous” can turn into a personification of the coronavirus. These prompts might seem like restrictions, but for BYU animation students Jaren Sloan and Forrest Stull, they ignite new ideas.
“You start narrowing things down, and that’s when you can start really pulling from bunches of different ideas,” Sloan said.
It also helps with ink confidence and quickness. “You can work through ideas, you don’t have focus on something, erase and fix mistakes — just learning to adjust as you go onto the next one, and so your drawing skill increases exponentially,” Stull said.
And even though Inktober ends in a couple days, the animation students say the ideas and skills people gain from the initiative can inspire all year-round.
