It’s October and that means Inktober time. This year I’ve decided to participate in the challenge but to do it a bit differently than I did in previous years:

• It’s still 30 ink sketches in 30 days. I’m using fountain pens for the entire challenge.
• I’ve limited myself to the Traveller’s Notebook airlines edition insert. I’ll post a review of it later this month, but the idea was to deliberately use a notebook that I thought was too precious to use before.
• I’m not following the official prompts (as usual). I never liked them, and this year’s prompts are no different.
• I’m not posting these to social media. At all. I’ll be posting them here and here only.

Now without further ado, here’s Inktober day 1’s sketch:

The giraffes aren’t originally pink, of course, but I sketched them with Pilot Iroshizuku Kosumosu ink and a Franklin Christoph 03 Iterum Sedona Spa fountain pen with a Nagahara fine cursive italic. It’s a beautiful combo, and fine cursive italics are great for getting interesting line variations while sketching with pen and ink.

Giraffes rarely sit down in the wild, as that’s way to risky for them (it takes to much time to get up and run, should they need to). In captivity they will sit down if they feel safe and comfortable, and it’s quite a sight. We saw these two during a night time safari at Animal Kingdom Lodge in Walt Disney World, Florida. Giraffes are suffering from poaching, from habitat fragmentation and from habitat lost, and many giraffe sub-species have only a few hundred individuals left. If you want to help them, the giraffe conservation fund focuses on these elegant and fascinating creatures: https://giraffeconservation.org