Inktober 2022 is in full swing! For those who aren’t aware of what exactly Inktober is, please check out their main site at https://inktober.com/ which helps explain it better and provides prompts. It’s a simple concept. Draw something in ink based on the days prompt, post it on social media with the hashtag #inktober and #inktober, then do it every single day in the month of October.
Sharing your artwork is always fun, and I love seeing people’s artwork as well! I’ve been posting videos of my live drawings on my tiktok as well as the still images on Instagram. For the past few years since I started Inktober, I’ve always gave myself 5-10 minutes to do the drawings. Why? Because I think it’s fun to just jot down a quick idea and see what sticks. Otherwise, doing a daily drawing would consume my world with all the stuff I have going on in my life. If you haven’t tried Inktober yet, don’t worry, there’s still time! Grab a pen or pencil and just draw based on the daily prompts! It doesn’t matter how good you are or if you think you’re terrible. I’m not the greatest, but I love drawing.
This year I been focusing on a candle. That’s right, just a candle. Why? I don’t know, but I liked the idea of drawing wax and incorporating whatever the daily prompt is to it. It’s not top tier level, but I’m having fun with it. Here’s a small example of Day 10, Crabby. Which is a candle, but more in line with Mr. Krabs from Spongebob.
Where have I been? Before the pandemic hit, I was gung ho about speaking at meetups, conferences, posting content and doing what I could to share what I knew. I would blog and make sure I had a steady stream of content on social media so I could network with other designers. Even before the pandemic hit, it slowed down. Where did the motivation go?
Almost three years ago, I found myself alone in raising my 3 boys. Great kids. Every free minute I had, was boosting them up, playing games and teaching them some cool things along the way. Networking and sharing my expertise was no longer relevant to me. We spent countless nights talking about our futures, what everyone wants to be when they grow up. We became video game and board game fanatics. Enjoying life! Since I work at a company where I can’t share anything I do, it was a giant relief not having to constantly update a portfolio everytime I made something really cool.
I have a special person in my life who adores my boys. We all play games, watch anime and just have a good time everyday. That’s the recreational part we all love, but what about professionally? What have I been doing? I became an information gathering nerd. I subscribe to multiple magazines, I have dozens of books ready to read after I finish a current book. I also make stickers and 3D print things.
The biggest thing I’ve been doing recently is getting into game design. I have 100+ udemy courses, but one in particular is how to make an idle clicker game in Unity. Why an Idle Clicker game? Well as part of gaming with my boys, we’d all sit around and pick an idle clicker game and see how far we could get in two days. I wanted to take it to the next step and learn how to make one myself to publish. I’m working on the bones of it now and nearly finished with the tutorial. Next step is to skin it with my custom illustration work.
I can sit here and say I’ll post updates on twitter, instagram and everything, but will I? I’ll try too. The past 3 years have been fun and games and I’m ready to make some professional progression in my life.
It begins again! I haven’t wrote on this blog since, well the last SeptemberJanuary challenge hosted by Jon Acuff. However, I’m doing it again! What is the SeptemberJanuary challenge you ask? Well it’s a yearly challenge started by Jon Acuff to encourage you to start and finish something in a month. Kind of like how we all have our new years resolutions, but in the middle of the year…ish.
This time I will add on to the challenge of last year. Last years challenge was to create a sticker and sell it. I came up with skullbot sketches as a sticker concept. The sketches turned out great, however something just didn’t resonate when I digitally recreated them in Illustrator. The month went by, and I just decided to continue on it next month. Life happened big time the next month, so the sticker project was just put on the backlog.
What a better way to rekindle the idea than with the same challenge? Only this time I’ve decided to change it up. This year the goal will be to sell 50 stickers. I’ve decided the sketches them selves looked raw enough that I plan on straight up putting them up as stickers! I do have a few steps that I wrote down that I need to plan out properly.
Find the skullbot or 2 that I want to make into a sticker
Finish it by making it into a sticker
Find a stinker printer and order stickers to be made. This one may be tough, because if shipping is more than a few weeks, this whole goal is bust.
Market the stickers. Come up with some google adwords, facebook ads, instagram and a variety of other social media platforms. Maybe venture into tiktok? I’ll come up with something.
Setup an online shop to actually purchase them online
Get shipping materials to send this stuff out.
Find a proper pricing to sell the stickers
That’s my short list of what I need to do. So much to do, especially in terms of setting up my own online store and marketing. However, I have the talent to do everything since I’ve done it all before. Now it’s time to do it for myself and see where I can go with it all!
It’s Day 10, a Tuesday, and I’ve started this week turning the sketches into vectors. Yesterday I finished the first one, which was the big eyes skullbot. Today I finished up the female version that my wife loved and gave her a nice shade of pink, also her favorite color.
I’ve been creating little icons lately for user interfaces, so starting to create these skullbots have been fun. They’re meant to be very simple illustrations with not too much to it. There will be a new sketch everyday for the rest of the week. Once that is all done, I’ll be creating a sticker sheet as well as a custom logo to go on that sheet. Then it’ll be ready to send out to the printers!
Cliff Nowicki is a Product Designer by day and a freelance web designer by night. If you’re looking for a new website or even a logo, make sure to go to the contact page and get in touch.
I finally got my skullbots down to the finals! I’ve adjusted it to 7, but 1 of them may get ditched. Why? There may be some adjustments in Illustrator that’ll either create more space or save more space.
How did I choose the finals?
Finding the right skullbots to use for this project was tough. I wanted to get a variety of feedback, so I leveraged my social media accounts. Facebook, twitter and instagram were used to get some feedback on what people liked. Some of the skullbots were big hits! However, there were a few that I was kind of hesitant on and didn’t make the final list. Since my main focus was to get a variety of feedback, I did favor the feedback of people that also showed off their sticker collection. After all, these people will probably buy them! That’s not all I did, I made sure to take the feedback from those who could potentially buy stickers and those who were just fans of skulls/robots
There is an outlier though! I wanted to combine two of my sketches together to create one single skullbot. The skullbot with the headset was cool, but my wife really wasn’t digging the mouth. She suggested that I use the mouth from one skullbot and put it on that one. That gave me a great idea for future projects. What if I made pieces, and created an art kit out of it? Something to keep in mind
Next Steps on Skullbots
So I got the sketches, now what? Each day this week I’ll spend time recreating each sketch. Each skullbot will get it’s own personal attention so I’m not just ripping through them. The process will include bringing the image into Adobe Illustrator and retracing into a vector format. This is where it may change from the original idea, but it’ll still look great!
Interested in following my sketches as I finish them? I’ll be making sure to keep posting actively after each vector is finished. If you can’t wait, or social media is your thing, you can follow me on twitter and instagram.
Cliff Nowicki is a Product Designer by day and a freelance web designer by night. If you’re looking for a new website or even a logo, make sure to go to the contact page and get in touch.
