Inktober sketches Days 6 – 12

I haven’t been posting these daily because I’d rather post them as a group.  Most of these Inktober sketches are 5 minute sketches except for the Breakfast Crawl sketch that I snapped a photo of before I added watercolor to it.   I start my  sketches by checking the Inktober prompt for the day that is taped to my calendar, then I use the Sktchy app for my inspiration.



For the ones that I do in my morning pages, I set my timer for 5 minutes. This way I am forced to say what I need to about the subject with minimum lines and it forces me to work quickly. 

My own personal Inktober challenge has been to add a five-minute, timed sketch to my morning routine. This way, no matter how the day goes, I still did one sketch. It helps break artist’s block for me, and I would recommend the five-minute exercise to anyone looking to establish a daily creative habit. It is one baby step in the right direction and anyone can do it. It forces me to not be so hung up on Perfectionism, which can be a form of procrastination and avoidance, and just sketching for five minutes can make all the difference with skills and creating quick art.





If you click on the link below, you can see #8 and the inspiration from Sktchy:

http://sktchy.com/VUnVK

Breakfast Crawl #5

Yesterday was Patchogue’s 5th Breakfast crawl.  I drew my own map of the Breakfast Crawl and submitted it to The Draw and Cook, and it was accepted!  

You can see the map here:

http://www.theydrawandtravel.com/illustrations/10616-breakfast-crawl-5-in-patchogue-new-york

John and I bought the 5 ticket crawl so we we only able to sample 5 of the 15 participating restaurants.   

I sketched what we ate:

Inktober sketches Days 2-5

 I really didn’t want to do Inktober again because I already have a daily sketching habit.  I had to come up with something new to make it fun for me.  So, my personal Inktober challenge is to add a 5 minute timed sketch to my morning routine. This way, no matter HOW the day went, I still did one sketch. 

 This also helps to break any artist’s blocks for me and it starts the day in the right direction.  I would recommend the 5 minute exercise to anyone looking to establish a daily creative habit. 5 minutes is a baby step in the right direction and anyone can spare 5 minutes a day.  Some people get hung up on the sketch being perfect.  It’s only a sketch!  Perfectionism is a form of procrastination and avoidance or basically, just another excuse people use to not follow through.  Sketching for 5 minutes can make all the difference in your skill level. If you get too hung up on being perfect, you’ll never finish anything. So set a timer and get stuff done!

Here are days 2-5…there also suggested prompts.  Sometimes I follow the prompt, sometimes I don’t….



Horses and yesterday’s Inktober Sketch

I spent over a week researching and working on this map that I did as a very belated Sketchbook Skool Assignment.  I was away when the class was “in session” and I mulled over ideas and nothing really inspired me until I saw they were requesting maps for Asia.  Then I had to mull that one over and almost passed that assignment over when I thought of horses.   So I did some research on horse breeds that originated in Asia and came up with this map.


I do have a scanned version so if you are interested in a print, please contact me.

Also, I did this yesterday as my husband was driving us to South Jersey to help my son.  This was my Inktober Day 1 sketch.  I posted it in Sktchy and on my sketch club’s Facebook page yesterday but never got a chance to post it on Social Media…

Art with coffee

I have a morning ritual where I get my day started with a few habits like exercise, morning pages and I have added a 5 minute timed sketch to the routine.  

I did this sketch in 5 minutes, all while enjoying my morning cup of java.

I look for something on Sktchy that I know I can sketch in 5 minutes, set the timer on my phone and get to it.  Here is this morning’s “Art with coffee.”


If you would like to read about my morning pages ritual, click below:

Morning ritual 

https://ginassketches.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/morning-rituals-a-good-way-to-start-your-day

Some recent sketches

I have been working on a project that I don’t wish to post just yet.  In the meantime, here are some sketches I did recently.

This one was an experiment that didn’t come out as intended, but I am content with the result.


This next sketch is a haiku sketch where you only have 7 lines to describe your subject.  I used 7 different colors so I could keep track of my own progress plus it helps the individual lines stand out.


Lastly, the photo of this little guy that was posted on Sktchy was too good to pass up so I sketched him.

Another painting started

This boat has been put out to pasture.  It’s a shame because it looked like it used to be a nice boat.  It’s pretty big.  Word in the boatyard is that it is being stripped down and it will be burned in a boat burning next month in Sayville.  I wanted to capture it’s last days as a boat before it was towed away.  I never got to it during the plein air event, but I was able to get out today and work on it. I decided to do an oil painting to change things up a little.  

I used a watercolor pencil to sketch it out first and you can see the burnt sienna from the pencil marks mixing with the paint.  Most of that will go away once I add the final layer, this is just the underpainting.  The underpainting is where I put a thin layer of paint to mark where the big shapes are.  I will probably go back tomorrow to finish it, if not, next week, to give the oil a chance to dry a little before I move on to the next layers.

I did the front because I liked the shape of the boat better in the front. All the details will be added later, plus any additional tweaking of line, shapes and color.  Darker values will also be added later.

Plein air again

Tonight was sketch night and I pulled the pastels out again…. I started this around 6 and the sun sets on the South shore at 7:09 so I didn’t have much  daylight toward the end of the painting session.  It still needs some tweaking if I wanted a polished piece and there is enough information here if I wanted to take it further so I am content with this one.