DRAWESOME

I watched the same video yesterday hah. I think the reason I succeeded last year was that I thought about how much time I wanted to dedicate to it and made sure my goal for success was low enough to hit. So even a 10 minute scribbly doodle with a ballpoint pen was a success. Which I did partly because hitting the daily goal last year was more important to me than trying to produce anything really nice.

This year I'm... I dunno. I think I'm more interested in composition and working on foundational and conceptual skills so that maybe next year I'll feel comfortable producing full illustrations. It'll be fun if I still manage to do something every day, but also it's okay if I give up somewhere, and I'm not sticking to always posting it either. It's more just an extension of what I was already doing in my sketchbook, with a slight restriction of making sure to use some ink in it. I'm mostly using mediums I already started to get familiar with last year: brush pens, ballpoint pen, ink washes. With mixing in maybe watercolor or posca pens and possibly doing initial sketches in graphite/col-erase. I'm using a couple sketchbooks, neither of which I particularly like, but I want to finish them up so I'm using them.

The challenge is part making sure this doesn't affect RL/work, ahah. And I guess working with the terrible paper in the one sketchbook and the size of the other.

Tips & Miscellany:

* Specific to ballpoint pens, I picked up some Bic Round Stic Grip since I've been hearing for years that other people love that particular pen for sketching, and what I realized is this brand has a very dry ink which means it beads less and lets you get finer/lighter lines. Though what makes them good for sketching makes me dislike them for writing, ahah.
* The Kuretake Fudegokochi brush pens were the ones I liked the feel of most last year, but they are not waterproof even after drying. However, I saw a comment about and then tested for myself that if you wait for some time, they actually do become water resistant. So some of the pieces I did last year I could actually use watercolor on now. I'm not quite sure how long you need to wait though, probably at least a couple weeks for the water resistance to take effect. But it was interesting to find out.
* Though if you want one that's just waterproof once it dries and a felt tip instead of a bristle tip, I'm liking the Zebra disposable so far.