INKtober 2026 - 5.10 - SMACK

The main reason to join INKtober is to make a habit out of drawing and painting something daily for a few minutes. The more you do it, the easier it is. Like @aellly always says: it is way easier to draw with a pencil than to paint. A pencil (or pen) and paper is all you need and you can do it everwhere.

I’ll leave my trying for now. It’s true, it’s not much to look at, and no, I’m not going to develop it any further.

What have I done?

• I’ve drawn with a dip pen and added Chinese ink.
• I used a Chinese brush with a few stray hairs
• I tried a couple of other dips for the pen, but I don’t think they’ll be of any use to me.
• My ink seems to be bleeding through my sketchbook's paper. So I’ve learnt something and it would be good if I did something with that info.
  For now I will fill the sketchbook and see where I stand at the end of this month.

SMACK immediately reminds me of the Dutch words smak and smakken. Both words have a double meaning: for example, you can smakken whilst eating, or it’s that little sound you make when you kiss, but ‘smak’ and ‘smakken’ also have connotations of pain and violence. If you make a loud smak, it means you’ve taken a nasty fall, and smakken something or someone to the ground isn’t exactly positive either.

I thought about looking into a barrel and seeing the bullet come out of it (4), and making that bang clear, but in the end I decided on an apple falling. Indeed, the prompt from day 1.

The drawing itself went well with both a dip pen and a brush, but when it came to creating the splatter effect with the thick round brush, it turned into a right mess and, to my horror, I also saw that the ink was seeping through the paper. So I decided to give it another go somewhere towards the back of the sketchbook, but that didn’t amount to much either. It didn’t get any better once the ink dried and, as a result, faded (though not enough to show what I drew underneat.

Chinese ink & bamboo paper

Incidentally, Chinese ink on bamboo paper can be worked with water for a bit longer, unlike watercolour paint, which soaks into the paper almost immediately and the same goes for water. So wetting a piece of paper first and then letting the paint run out is virtually impossible, unless you’re very, very quick.
With Chinese ink, it works the other way round. I can apply the ink to the paper and then add water to make it run, in my case, it runs a little too much and of course the paper cannot be prepared or be flattened.

You can see my attempts below, enjoy and have a good laugh.

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This was a quick one





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Just a blot the shrink shows and asks you to describe, or...

The Sketchbook

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Some few minutes scribbles underneath what is spoiled (by me)
An idea popped up after I took this photo...





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