This is my twenty-seventh illustration for Inktober 2021, this one for the prompt "spark".

I peeked at the prompt for today the night before - which is how I usually do things with Inktober - just to get a jump start on my brainstorming, but came up blank. I don't hate doing straightforward drawings for the prompts, but I like to be creative about it when I can. The best I could think of was to draw an explosion.

So today I was thinking about that idea and how it could be more interesting, and I came up with this, a zippo lighter, as it sparks into ignition.

I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out. I wanted to have the lighter be the primary focus, but also have the hand be very large in the frame. I liked how it looked plain at the end, but thought it could use a tiny bit more detail, and after almost changing it into the (famous?) lighter from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I went for this adjacent design.

Time-lapse below!

Here's my twenty-sixth illustration for Inktober 2021, this one for the prompt "connect"!

This was one that I struggled with. Initially, I wanted to draw a man pumping gas into his car, and noticing that both the car and the pump had odd looks on their faces - but it didn't fit well in the square panel, so I quickly changed course to the idea you see above.

As always, there's a time-lapse of me making this below!

For the first drawing of the last week of Inktober 2021, I drew this fly - or what's left of him, anyway. The prompt for this one is "splat".

Originally, I thought I'd make the fly a lot smaller, draw more of the flyswatter, and have the handle of it blur off into the distance. When I actually got started, I decided I wanted to make the splat take up more space, and so this is what that idea turned into.

Time-lapse of this illustration below!

Here's my twenty-fourth illustration for Inktober 2021! This one is for the prompt "extinct", and I've flipped the roles of dinosaur and human.

Should the dinosaur have been in clothes? This was something I thought about while drawing this. I'm still not sure, but I like how it came out nonetheless.

Time-lapse below!

My twenty-third illustration for Inktober 2021, for the prompt "leak", is a trick-or-treater with a little candy problem.

I knew what I wanted to draw as soon as I started, but I struggled to get the pose of the character right. After a few attempts at winging it, I decided to dig into an animation book and get a reference pose. So thanks to The Animator's Survival Kit for saving me on this one.

I also had a hard time decided whether or not it might be better with a little vignette effect at the end, but ultimately decided against it. It's probably fine!

Time-lapse of my struggle below:

I've had to go to the dentist (and periodontist) for a number of reasons lately, and so my twenty-second illustration for Inktober is a dental scene. The prompt for this one is "open".

Time-lapse of me creating this one below!

I'm closing out the third week of Inktober 2021 with a rat eating some cheese, only to find a nasty patch of fuzzy mold on the side. The prompt for this one was "fuzzy".

I feel like I draw a rat or a mouse eating cheese at least once every time I do this project. If that's actually true, I blame all the cartoons I watched as a kid, like Tom & Jerry. So many cat/mouse chases. So many stolen morsels of cheese.

Time-lapse of me creating this drawing below!

For my twentieth illustration for Inktober 2021, I drew a man with a new hair!

Time-lapse below:

Here's my nineteenth Inktober illustration, for the prompt "loop".

I sat down at my iPad not knowing what I might draw. I thought about doing a mobius strip, or a cartoon character running on a conveyor belt. I had an idea about doing an infinite fall through a set of interconnected portals. I thought about somehow drawing the feedback loop you get through a mic and a sound system.

And then, after a moment of thought, a lightbulb appeared above my head. And then I draw this!

Time-lapse video below:

My eighteenth illustration for Inktober 2021 is a moon base - for the prompt "moon".

I almost ended up drawing a little cartoon character pulling his pants down and mooning the viewer. I should have drawn that first as my sketch, then gone over it with the moon base, as a little bonus. Perhaps next time.

This was a complicated one, so here's a rather long time-lapse of its creation: