October is a big month for art challenges on Instagram. This year I took part in drawlloween on my Tiny Troll Studios Instagram account using the prompt list from Mabs Drawlloween Club. This prompt list was put together by Mab Graves.
The idea behind these challenges is to take part as often as you can through the month of October using the prompts provided. Since it’s October the prompts tend to be on the spooky side.
I managed to participate on 21 of the days. Ragweed was out in force here in Texas and it laid me low for a few days but I did what I could. Here are all of my little drawings together. I had started out with a silhouette theme for all my little pictures. I thought the theme was clever but maybe it was a little too clever because most of my posts didn’t do that well. Maybe it was clever and there were just so many people participating they all got lost in the mix. Who knows? What I do know is the raven at the bottom, that took me all of 10 minutes to create, was far and away my most popular post for Drawlloween.
Here are my two favorite images from the month. I love the colors for grave and the natural separation of the ground and sky. I used colored pencil to get some extra detail in the dirt and that was fun. The werewolf was a favorite because he turned out better than I imagined he would. Even though I do small drawings all the time I was amazed with how much detail I was able to get out of his tiny silhouette.
Instagram had very different favorites based on number of likes. The witches kettle was the first post of the month so it made sense because over time it got more likes. The raven, on the other hand, was the last post of the month and didn’t match the theme at all and within 24 hours he had more likes than any of my other posts from the month. He is pretty cool though. The rat – for that one I have no idea. I mean he’s pretty cute but maybe it was the glitter paint or the splatters. The world will never know I’m sure.
I took the opportunity during this challenge to try a bunch of new techniques and supplies I’d never used before. Some of my experiments were more successful than others. Here I tried plastic bag on the alien, salt on the mushroom, water soluble oil pastels for seance, and a sponge for the creature from the black lagoon.
I also practiced my splatter technique with a variety of paints and brushes and I’m certainly improving. One thing I learned is that glitter paint doesn’t work that well for splatter.
So there’s all my drawlloween posts. I hope you liked them. Let me know which one was your favorite in the comments.
This is a hard choice! I’d say my top three are Laboratory, Yokai, and Grave.
Yes those are all good! I like the lab too and the yokai was fun because I didn’t know what they were.