Inktober 2022 Doodles

We moved house recently, and in the ensuing madness, it was hard to keep up with my usual creative therapy of art journaling. I mostly stuck to doodling during this transition period, since it does not require a lot of supplies–and it helped maintain my sanity. 🙂

We’re settling down now, and in between the still-ongoing fix-ups and unpacking and organizing and the resulting fatigue, it’s still hard to dedicate time and energy for regular art journaling, and I still find myself using doodling as a creative outlet. (Not that it’s a bad thing. 🙂 ) Since Inktober also arrived during this time, I’ve been making Zentangle-inspired daily doodles in a tiny journal during October.

^{Days 1-15. The one on the top-left is a previous art journal page, so it’s a bonus! 😉}

Though there are the usual Inktober prompts this year, and Zentangle prompts for Inktober in particular, I didn’t follow any of them. I just wanted therapeutic creative time, and didn’t want to burden myself with prompts.

I doodled in the mini art journal that I’d made when the year began. I’ve barely used it till date, and this seemed liked a good occasion to fill most of it up. I’d made quite a few gel-print marks on the pages when I prepped the journal, and I expected them to get in the way of doodling, but surprisingly, that didn’t happen.

^{Days 16-31}

Like always, I used gel pens for the doodles; and for the shading, oil-based pencils with a blending tool, and watercolor pencils with a water brush pen. There were some days when I couldn’t manage a doodle, and I made up for it by creating double spreads or two doodles on the days when I had extra energy.

Compared to my 2021 Inktober doodles, I feel the current ones reflect the current (mildly) chaotic period in my life. I know that I wasn’t as immersed in the doodling as I usually am, and there were a few days when the process didn’t feel very meditative. Having said that, though, I’m incredibly glad I did doodle almost daily during the month–I feel better than I would have if I hadn’t done this activity!

Art in any form is better than no art at all, right? 🙂

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