Inktober 2020
Challenging myself to make visual patterns for word prompts
Every October, artists all over the world take on the Inktober drawing challenge by doing one ink drawing a day the entire month.
Stuck at home, amidst a pandemic, I did find myself some time in between projects and decided to give Inktober2020 a shot.
I think the last time I did this was in 2017.
Even though one is expected to make ink drawings by hand, it is more about challenging yourself to create something based on a prompt and do it every day for the entire month. I decided to make patterns — and my primary tool of choice was Adobe Illustrator. I wanted to polish my vector drawing skills and explore the tool a bit more, especially features that I have not used much before.
P.S. I stopped short, yet again, by nearly a week, but I totally enjoyed the journey and learnt a few things in the process!
The first thing that came to mind was fish and chips that I absolutely adored, along with a few pints of Budweiser. I tried to used the shape of the fish to fit into the curly fries and came up with this.
Also, I have always wanted to try out the salt-and-pepper noise gradients—and I did add a generous helping of that on most of the illustrations you will see on the page.
For this, I wanted to make some forest spirits with an interplay of light and dark (the other side). Well, it also looks like giant locusts wearing anklets, so see what you may wish to see!
I had been revising the Marvel Comic Universe around that time and wanted to see hulk on a cellular level.
Cells, wrapped in gamma weeds, anyone?
Well, well, well… remember those days of Winamp music art?
Tried to make some equaliser bars, wrapped in standing waves, and all together they make a face. Quirky enough to be an alternative Radiohead logo?
I had to google a bit to see what relevant visuals I could dig up on Bladerunner, and it looked like the origami horses were quite popular. Tried to recreate some low-poly origami blades and runners in illustrator.
Not much of a pattern, but the process was fun!
I have always been a fan of MC Escher’s tessellations. Remember the one where fishes turn into birds?
Well, this isn’t one like that, but I tried to play on the form using the metaphor — you are what you eat! Rats burrowing for groundnuts!
It was around that time that Tanishq, the Indian jewellery brand, got into a controversy with its ad promoting communal harmony. Anyway, I thought of making some jewellery patterns. A bit of gradient and I got sort of the shimmer I expected from the lines.
Inspired by the massive gears inside the A-10 “tank buster” machine gun. It took me a while to figure out how to make the gear teeth using a pattern brush and align them to fit with the teeth in place.
The pandemic has been going on for a while now, and I guess I was a bit tired of seeing all the improper ways people around wore their face masks. So I made some masks, worn, below the nose, borrowing aesthetics from caution signage. Love how the ear loops intertwine nicely when stacked.
Dandelions and fractals are cool. So, I wanted to create fractal-like geometries inside Illustrator and discovering the possibilities using the transform-tool was an absolute game-changer! I made two symbols comprising the line and the head in blue and yellow. The rest was then generated and made to grow in opposite directions. They were then resized and moved around to fill up the canvas space.
I guess the most disgusting thing about the year is the coronavirus. So I decided to pair it up with trypophobia. It was a good exercise playing with the gradients and shadows to create the illusion of depth.
I wanted to make one of those optical illusions that mess with the sense of direction and flow of sight. Tried a couple of versions with different directions of light and shade, but settled with this.
How one often dreams about slippery slopes and bottomless pits…
Stuck at home, separated from friends and family, I guess it was quite a low moment. Spoonfuls of despair…
If 2020 was a world war, the doctors, medical professionals and all the other frontline workers would be the soldiers. It was a straightforward illustration of the face-shields that are used as a part of the personal protection gear.
This is one of the other ones that heavily relied on the transform effect. The outline of the rings uses a brush made of small circles. The rings are then arranged into the orb using concentric transformations. Wanted to create a dreamscape where thoughts are stowed away in small pockets in our mind, kinda like Professor Dumbledore’s pensieve!
MCU again got to me. Have you seen a cuter rocket?
I worked in the exhaust of a rocket into the beard and it was one of the happy ones that I wouldn’t mind wearing on my t-shirt or shorts!
The local news channels had been spewing utter nonsense for a while now, and I took this opportunity to vent out. TV news has become a contest for generating noise and it’s as crazy as the illustration before you.
I wanted to create some nets that I could work into a trap. Starting with a regular hexagon, the transforms worked their magic, creating the nice circular pattern at the centre, almost creating an effect of crochet. I laid a mesh on top of the whole things and manipulated it at the edges of the hexagons to make it feel more organic.
This was a difficult one, but I knew I wanted to create something trippy. The base tesselation (before) was made in illustrator using my now-favourite transform tools. It was later modified in a glitch app to create the extrusions and colour offset effect.
The ones that follow, were first created as a single illustration in illustrator (before) and then tesselated using various transformations (fractal geometries, pixel manipulations etc.) in a glitch app.
The last one (for me) was around the time when Sean Connery, one of my favourite James Bonds, had passed away. So, this was intended as a tribute — “You only live twice but he shall live on…”
If you have made it this far, thank you!
Feel free to hit me up on Instagram where I usually post my artwork and photographs.
I also intend to put some of these artworks for sale as prints and other merchandise. Stay tuned!
