The TLDR (Too Long Didn’t Read) Version

Consistency is the key to progress. Stay the course!

The Long Version

We can hardly believe it, but Inktober has been around for 10 years now! That is definitely a feat, especially considering the short attention span of the internet😜

For the uninitiated out there, it’s a monthlong art challenge where artists all over the world do an ink drawing every single day of October and share their progress on social media. That's 31 drawings in 31 days! The goal is to improve your inking skills and develop positive drawing habits.

It was started waaaay back in 2009 by Jake Parker, one of the founders of SVSLearn. When Jake came up with the idea for Inktober, he knew that accountability was a key piece of becoming better as an artist, so he made sharing your artwork a part of the challenge.

Back then, social media was just starting to gain traction. Youtube was taking off, Facebook was still cool, Instagram and Pinterest weren’t even around yet! There weren’t as many options for sharing artwork with the public, so a lot of his early Inktober stuff was posted on Flickr, Tumblr and his old blog, which isn’t around anymore (or is it?)

It’s fun to see all his ink drawings from the early days. You can definitely see a progression in his skills and style and storytelling over time.

Which brings us to our point - progress is all about consistency. Just showing up and doing the work day after day is the most important thing you can do if you want to make progress. Improvement comes from making incremental gains over time.

Take Inktober. When Jake first started posting his Inktober work on Flickr, he had no inkling that Inktober would ultimately turn into a global art event with 1 million posts on Instagram in the first 3 days. His first Flickr posts got just a handful of Faves. But he kept showing up and doing it, year after year. (Well, he did take one year off, but that was due to an injury he sustained. Overall though, he remained consistent!)

Why did Inktober succeed? There’s probably a lot of different factors that lead to Inktober blowing up. For one, it was one of the first art challenges out there, so it has longevity on its side. For another, it’s catchy and easy to remember. And it actually works for a lot of artists out there!

But one of the main reasons behind its success is consistency. If Jake didn’t keep doing it year after year, and slightly tweaking and improving it year after year, it would probably fade from memory, like so much other stuff on the internet. But every Inktober, he built on what he learned the year before, and ultimately ended up in a very different place from where he started.

It’s the same with becoming a better artist. There’s a lot of factors that can lead to success, but one of the main ones is consistency. It takes repetition and dedicated practice consistently over time to really make a difference in your skill set.

“That’s really how you learn, is by repeating something over and over and over again. That’s how you learn an instrument, that’s how you learn to do a lay up in basketball, it’s how you learn to hit a baseball, and it’s how you learn how to draw... You don’t get good at drawing by doing a really in-depth, complicated drawing that takes you 5 weeks to finish and calling that good. You learn how to draw by doing 500 drawings in 5 weeks and by failing a little bit on each drawing, but also learning from each mistake you make.”

— Jake Parker

So with that in mind, we hope you stay the course and finish Inktober! We know its tough to keep going, especially at this stage in the game. It would be so much easier to just call it quits, right?

But even if you missed some days, or fell off the wagon completely, it’s not too late to get back on track! Because in our book, consistency is not about perfection, it’s about an overall pattern of behavior. If you mostly stick it out, that’s still progress! And sometimes even just a little progress can make all the difference⭐️