My boatober 2025 post for the first seven days was epic and very long, so I’m switching to more frequent blog posts for this challenge.

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 8 – Commercial Boat

Here’s my sketch of the Commercial Boat in the harbour, for day 8.

Enjoyment Level: ****

This commercial boat was great to sketch, and I really liked the effect of the rusted elements on the hull. I was also pleased with the “out of focus” mooring hardware in the foreground, that I painted wet-in-wet, and without using ink lines.

This approach works really well for creating something that looks a little soft focus/out of focus. It’s there but because it doesn’t jump out at you. This makes it easy for your eye to jump over it and onto the main subject in this sketch.

Still not comfortable or happy with the water, but I still have the rest of the month to get this mastered. I also tried to loosen up the look of the sky with some splattering. More on that below.

Bit of a messy 15 minute sketch today. I used a sky I’d experimented with the previous day, and painted the boat on top, so I lost a few of the white areas because the sky showed through. But I like the idea of sketching on top of skies and seeing the result.

Using Watercolour Splatter in Ink Sketches

Today I decided to experiment with splatter in my boatober contribution!

After I’d done it, I decided it was probably a good idea to do a little research as to how to get the best effect (because mine didn’t quite hit the mark!). So I watched a video by urban sketcher Toby.

Historically, I’ve only spattered on skies, and just left all the splatters in place, but Toby demonstrated a technique where he splatters watercolour on a page, and then moves it about to join up the dots with water. This creates a random more natural wash, which is much more interesting than a flat wash.

Experimenting with Watercolour Splatter

Here’s a couple of thumbnails I did to practice Toby’s technique of splattering and then joining the dots up with water. I did the skies wet-in-wet, splattered, then added more water.

On the thumbnail on the left I kept some splatters at the top, and on the thumbnails on the right I blew the ink to create drips.

I did this quick boat sketch from one of my Bodrum boat photos. (Doing boatober has already been a benefit – only a week in, and here I am whipping up quick boat pictures without a second thought!)

There’s more variation in this sky, which is the results I was hoping for. I also did a bit of splatter to the right of the rocks, to give the impression of them petering out, rather than abruptly stopping.

Painting Over Splatter Skies

I also created a couple of sample splatter skies which turned out well. So I used one of them as the background for today’s 15 minute sketch. I sketched the boat over the sky, and was running out of time on this, so left the pencil lines in too.

I have a feeling I’m going to be playing around with this effect a lot. I’d much rather create abstract skies than frou-frou delicate and precise skies.