Introducing OCtober: A fun alternative to Inktober

October is usually the month of pumpkins, spooky games and questionable amounts of candy. This year, however, I decided to add something else to the mix: drawing (my) original character(s) (OC) every single day.

Welcome to OCtober.

The idea is pretty simple. For every day of October, I’ll do a quick doodle, sketch, or draw a full-on thing for my original character – the catch being that the time limit increases every day. Ramping up from an initial 1-minute to a full-on four hours.

Why OCtober?

I’ve always enjoyed creating original characters, but actually sitting down and drawing them is a different matter entirely. It’s very easy to spend hours trying to get one drawing right, especially when you’re the kind of person who keeps noticing another little thing that could be fixed.

OCtober is my attempt to get around that.

Look, October also features Inktober and various other drawing challenges but I always found it difficult to find a prompt list for Inktober that I felt excited about and the AI slop out there kinda killed the fun of it. Instead of relying on prompts, let’s make it a fun little challenge to get me (and others in my community) back into the groove of just drawing fun little characters!

So, in essence, draw something every day within a certain time limit. Get into a habit. Get the creative juices flowing.

The “Rules”

The rules are simple because I used all of my creativity and energy to come up with “OCtober” as a name. I know that it’s great.

• Draw one original character every day.
  • This doesn’t have to be an existing character but it can be. As long as it’s something uniquely yours, draw it. Have fun with it!
• Each day is a new drawing.
• Set the timer before starting.
• Stop when the timer runs out.
• Do not continue the drawing later.
• AI is for losers and chuds. Don’t be a chud loser.

It doesn’t need to look great. The goal is to just do it basically and see what you’re capable of. I’m fully aware that four hours is a lot of time. It’s a lot of time I don’t have but even making do with my limited time seems like a great idea. So, that’s just the upper limit.

Any kind of medium (paper doodles, watercolours, digital) is okay, except for AI slop. We’re doing art here.

The OCtober Time Limits

The progression will look like this:

Day	Time Limits	Alternative Time Limits
1	1 minute	5 minutes
2	2 minutes	5 minutes
3	3 minutes	5 minutes
4	5 minutes	5 minutes
5	7 minutes	10 minutes
6	10 minutes	10 minutes
7	15 minutes	10 minutes
8	20 minutes	10 minutes
9	25 minutes	10 minutes
10	30 minutes	10 minutes
11	35 minutes	15 minutes
12	40 minutes	15 minutes
13	50 minutes	15 minutes
14	1 hour	15 minutes
15	1 hour 15 minutes	15 minutes
16	1 hour 30 minutes	20 minutes
17	1 hour 45 minutes	20 minutes
18	2 hours	20 minutes
19	2 hours 15 minutes	20 minutes
20	2 hours 30 minutes	20 minutes
21	2 hours 45 minutes	25 minutes
22	3 hours	25 minutes
23	3 hours 15 minutes	25 minutes
24	3 hours 30 minutes	25 minutes
25	3 hours 45 minutes	25 minutes
26	4 hours	30 minutes
27	4 hours	30 minutes
28	4 hours	30 minutes
29	4 hours	30 minutes
30	4 hours	30 minutes
31	4 hours	30 minutes

The reason I’m capping the challenge at four hours is that I don’t want OCtober to turn into “spend your entire evening drawing one character.” Four hours is already plenty of time to make something approaching a proper illustration while still having that pressure of a ticking clock. You don’t have to use all of that time. Heck, I’ve got work to do on the 31st, so I know I won’t be able to utilise all of that.

Edit: I’ve decided to add an alternative that is much shorter and manageable, as it is in the spirit of the challenge and less daunting. So, rather than scaling all the way to four hours, it instead will scale from five minutes until 30.

So… Let’s Draw Some OCs

For the entire month of October, I’ll be documenting the process and sharing the results on Bluesky and my Discord server. Feel free to participate as well.

Either way, by the end of the month I’ll have 31 drawings, 31 different time limits, and hopefully a much better idea of what I can actually accomplish when I stop overthinking every line.

OCtober starts October 1st.

This post was originally published on Indiecator.

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