I started off blogging so efficiently about my first #boatober art challenge. I wanted to make sure I captured what I liked and disliked about each of my boat sketches. But life (well, the installation of a new roof) got in the way. Dealing with the woes of construction has a profound way of ruining the zen of creativity. So I just focused on keeping up with the sketching challenge, and now that boatober is over, I’m going to get caught up on the sketch review process.

What is Boatober?

Boatober is an annual art challenge hosted by Doug Jackson. He posts a different inspiration photo each day, and artists around the globe, sketch the scene in their own style. This is the first year I’ve participated, and I’m using it as an opportunity to experiment with different ink and watercolour techniques.

Boatober 2025 Day 19

Can’t say I really enjoyed this sketch, or liked the final result. I felt a little boated-out, and was beginning to lose my mojo. The one saving grace was I like the boat’s wake.

Boatober 2025 Day 20

The challenge with this boat sketch was how to depict the light effectively with within the dark setting. Definitely the creative mojo going…

Boatober 2025 Day 21

So much going on in this sketch, and the boat just became blah! I had fun doing the rocks, and in my mind they were going to be eye-catching, but reality didn’t match my expectations.

My mojo was defiantly running on empty. So after doing this trio of sketches I jumped over to a line-work tutorial by Matt Gibbons, and I created a couple of loose building sketches that I really liked (I’ll post them once I’ve finished with boatober).

This break away from boats, did my mojo the world of good!

Boatober 2025 Day 22

This sketch was so fun to do. I really enjoyed the inking process after doing my loose pencil sketch. After doing the Matt ink-line tutorial, I switched out the pen I was using for boatober, and started using my Sailor Fude pen to inject a bit of variety into my lines.

As you can see in this ink sketch above, there’s a mix of heavy and light lines, as well as broken lines. I learned a valuable lesson today. If you’re starting to feel disenchanted with your sketching output, switch something up. Change is as good as a rest! And using a different pen really helped to loosen up my sketching style.

This was such a fun scene to paint, and I’ve ended up framing it. I really liked the use of light, shade, and colour to give a sense of depth, and add a clear and defined focal point.

The same day I did this sketch, I went down to the water and took loads of photos of rowing boats.

Boatober 2025 Day 23

Continuing on my creative roll, I enjoyed doing the pencil sketching phase of this drawing. I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle the water, but was inspired by the composition of the source image.

I didn’t have any medium to preserve the white of the paper for the wake, so I had to do negative painting, and then add layers on top of the white area to create the wake. I really faffed about with the boat’s wake for ages, and when it was done I didn’t like it. But now it’s grown on me.

I really like the background sea technique of using a clean wet brush to create the lighter areas of the ocean surface. When you do this, you can’t control how it’s going to turn out, but maybe that’s part of the charm.

I may not have enjoyed the creative process for three of these boatober challenges, but each day I learned something new. Even if it was – what not to do next time!