Hello creative friend,
If you are feeling like me on this Sunday evening, then you are both tired and grateful. Tired because of an additional daily challenge, and grateful that I managed the time and completed all the prompts on time. October is Inktober month in my life - not only the prompts themselves, but also making the time to draw every day.
I posted my drawings on Instagram, as the challenge requires, but also in a group called ArtKula.com. The group was founded by Phil Davies (the ArtTutor). He is a skilled instructor and like many others I have learned a lot from him over the years.
I was quite happy to get the invitation to join ArtKula, but getting involved in a new group is a challenge for me. I left many Facebook groups over the years because they grew so big that it became too overwhelming to try and have a decent conversation with anyone. ArtKula is different.
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It still has a huge number of members, over 13,000, but people have the opportunity to join smaller groups where similar minds can find common ground. Groups like watercolour, mixed media, and pen and ink. I belong to all three, but that is not what this blog post is about. I want to talk about community.
Artists that run online classes often have thousands and thousands of people doing their courses, and then their student join their Facebook groups and they love to call these groups a tribe or a community. To me that is not even remotely close to being a community. How can you form connections with 45,000 people? It is physically impossible in the real world, and I don't buy that social media can make it happen. What makes it happen is a smaller group of people who support each other. A small group of people who share things about their life and art and how the two impact the other. Because life and art are not separate things. People that find connection because they are willing to do the work.
While I spend a lot of time drawing and painting, even teaching art, I don't always share my art online, except Inktober and Inktober52. And now we get to the point of this post.
ArtKula also has a monthly challenge, where the members can explore different mediums as their own interpretation of the theme. October was Inktober month on ArtKula too. So it was with trepidation that I posted my first drawing for Inktober. I don't know if I was the first to post a drawing for Inktober, but it wasn't too long before more and more people started to post.
Artists of various skill levels. But one thing stood out above everything else: people were supportive. No negative comments that I could see. Of course, the group has moderators to keep us all in check, but I only had a positive vibe throughout the whole month.
Prompts elicited discussions, and laughs, and inspiration, and sympathetic comments like I have never seen in any other group before. It was fun chatting about the difficulties of finding time to draw, complaining about the prompts that we didn't like, and cheering the amazing drawings that many people made.
With NaNoWriMo starting on Tuesday, the finalisation of Keeper of the Dragon Key still on my to do list, and the art exhibition, I don't think I will have time to do much art. But one thing I do know: come December I will be back to take part in the ArtKula monthly challenge and to chat and learn from the amazing people I had met in October in this group.
If you are taking part in NaNoWriMo, I wish you all the best with your writing endeavours. May your target challenge you to achieve something new. If you are a veteran, may the 50,000 words be the next milestone on your writing journey.
Thank you for reading!
Until next time,
🇿🇦💜 Linzé
