A Little Nudge

Creative prompts, for better and worse

I don’t recall when I started to play along with the annual inking challenge in the month of October. Several years ago, anyway. It evolved for me, with my growing skills and desire to protect my own creativity, into an independent challenge. Instead of creating alongside a vast community of artists, I wandered off on my own. Which, er, probably tells you a lot about me, given this isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last I do something like that.

However, prompts you give yourself just aren’t quite as savory and spicy as those given to you, where you have to reach and stretch and grow into them as you’d never have thought to do that or pair that with that! So I’d asked folks who knew and liked my work if they could help me. I shared earlier this week the results of the last few years of those prompts.

Without further ado, other than to pause and thank everyone who responded this year, here is the N’inktober 2024 prompt list!

I had respondents from the comments on my earlier post, via email, X, Discord, and I even logged into Facebook for the first time in more than a month to talk to my art group there since I have rather abandoned them. All told, I had well over 180 words that I put into two columns, then randomized them (more than once, for good measure). Finally I looked at them to make sure I had a word pair that would be able to be drawn - there are sometimes two words that just don’t work together - and put them in more grammatical arrangements as I know last year’s list made a friend crazy with the word orders being random (like the first day’s prompt would have been Grue millefleur).

Why prompts, then, for a creative? Well, in this case it’s a fun way to guide a focused effort in digital inking. However, they can also be really useful if you’re in the doldrums about your work as an artist or creative of any flavor. There are times, personally, and this seems to be the case with others I’ve talked to, where I am bombarded with ideas from my own brain. There are others where I feel hollow and empty, wandering in a fog that swallows up my own voice. In those, a prompt can get me moving in a direction - right, wrong, doesn’t matter, momentum breeds momentum.

Which is why my business logo is a velocipede-riding squirrel. Often distracted, but never not in motion. Me? I’m often distracted and sometimes crash, then have to figure out how to get back up and moving again. When I was trying to learn how to ride a unicycle (I never got good at it) I realized that momentum was key. You’re either falling, or you’re moving too fast to fall. Well. In a manner of speaking. Faster was better. You can’t stop (without getting off of it) on a unicycle, or a velocipede for that matter. For the record I’ve never ridden one of those, so it’s all academic and imaginary.

Much like the prompts. We’ve tried this, over at More Odds Than Ends, the weekly prompt challenge, giving just one prompt to the whole group for the week. The results were all wildly different, which is exactly what I expected, and I loved seeing it. When I ask for prompts, people will try to give me a little nudge in the direction they want me to go in, and will be dumbfounded when they discover me in a wholly unexpected orientation to their expectations.

If you do create from any of these prompts, I’d love to see what you do!