Multifaceted creativity

This week after the challenge of being instantly creative at the Havant Writers' retreat, I've taken on a rather different challenge.  I've decided to do #Inktober.

It's a drawing challenge where you produce a drawing a day with only black ink in response to a daily prompt.  It's a while since I've done any serious drawing, although if you went back a decade or so you would've always seen me working on something.  I've experimented with coloured pencils, watercolour pencils, watercolurs, gouache, and acrylic paints.  About the only medium I haven't used is oils, and that's really because of practicality.  I have no dedicated space for creative work, hence nowhere I could leave out a wet oil painting to dry.

I've discovered that Inktober is a completely different challenge from anything I've done before.  The image has to be rendered on white paper using only black ink, and that means lines have to describe everything; colour, shadows, perspective, mass, and it means I've had to get very creative with using different marks.

How does this relate to writing, you might ask?  Well, the creepy trees I created for my latest novel  have got an outing in these drawings.  It's enabled me to road-test my ideas, and see if they look right in physical form.  I've described the trees' strange appearance in detail in the books so I used my written creativity to guide my drawing creativity.

It often works the other way round.  Several of my books have alien big cats in them, and I've used images of Earth's big cats as a basis for them, deciding what to change from the familiar blueprints I know.  So on a planet with red grasses my lion-like cats have rusty-red fur to blend in better.  And I've imagined that some big cats might grow to the size of a small pony.  I think that would be their upper limit as predators.  Full-sized horses might be too heavy and slow to catch prey.

As a science fiction writer I'm always creating new worlds, and I'm always creatively altering creatures I see on this world for my stories.  In one story of an Inuit-type people resisting an alien invasion, I had telepathic big cat teams pull the colonists' sleds instead of huskies.

Inktober has been fun for multifaceted creativity.  I'd never have thought of creating a dry stone moongate with a paradise garden seen through it if I hadn't tried that prompt.  And I might get to incorporate it as a setting in one of my novels one day.