31 Illustrations in 3 Days: What I learned from #Drawlloween 2015

The goal of #drawlloween was to illustrate certain characters from Halloween based on a list originally made by Thirteen Paradox Design.

Kevin Luong continued the tradition and the marvelous illustrator, Isaiah Stephens, shared this drawing campaign with me on Facebook.

I had a few simple tools at my disposal, and I figured I would try to at least keep pace with other illustrators. Here are my tools:

• .7mm Uniball Grip pen for most outlines
• A dual sided red Copic Sketch marker
• A random assortment of color pencils.
• 140 lb cold press watercolor paper.

Go With The Flow

Continue creating while your ideas are fresh.

I started on September 30th around 10pm and continued until I finished on October 2nd around 8pm. The challenge was designed to be done over the month of October. I was having so much fun, I wanted to keep going even if that meant I finished in 3 days. I stayed up until I started nodding off during illustrations. I took care of other paying side projects between illustrations, and I was so immersed every moment away from my drawing pad was focused on what concepts I would use in the next illustration.

I also noticed my down time habits changed. During the times where I normally would use my phone to kill time, I would re-purpose that time to draw. I would make sure I had my tools with me in the car or in a gallon ziploc bag when I went for a walk.

I wanted to finish off Hit Record Season 1 on Netflix, but I kept feeling a pull to the drawing pad.

Change Your Medium.

If you get stuck on a project, change your tools.

The grave seemed to be easy, but I couldn’t get the depth of the letters D-I-E-T correct. It took several tries on pencil to get the spacing good enough to make out the letters, but I switched to pen for the final illustration, which mocks my history with diets.

Perfection < Follow Through

It is better to meet your goal than to perfect one milestone.

I experienced this the most with the baby raven in an argyle sweater. I had a perfect outline, but accidentally drew an edge to the sweater that was to the left of the wing when I wanted it to be under the wing. I had no choice but to start the black diamonds of the argyle sweater on my mistake and build from there.

I was very happy with the alien illustration when I drew it in pencil, but I made a huge mistake when I forgot to draw the items closest to the viewer first. I had to change what was intended to be horns into tentacles to complete the illustration.

Here are all 31 illustrations.

(There is an extra illustration due to some confusion on the typo in the #drawlloween graphic for entry #25.)

I noticed certain drawings were doing better than others so I decided to chart which where the top 5 drawings on Instagram.

Note: I published all of these images daily at first on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. I also eventually posted the images on Facebook. Having the same image on the most popular social media platforms was an unexpected experiment where I learned Instagram is far better for illustrators than any other platform. The community instantly responds to each post, and there was rarely a feeling of releasing a sketch and hearing crickets. There was a strong community present and I was able to quickly meet new Instagrammers who were accomplished artists that would challenge me to work harder.