30 Days, 30 Inks: Day 30
The Ink
Day 30: Dominant Industry Maple
I can’t recall when I bought this, whether it was part of my search for red inks that I wanted to use, or what. Like many of the other fall inks I featured in this series, Maple did not really appeal to me until fall seasonality hit me. When first going on the page wet, it has that quality of looking like bloody liquid that prevents me from liking a lot of reds. But after it dries, it does look like the color of maple leaves, as you can compare to the picture I took below (ironically, taken in the middle of summer a couple years ago).
It has nice shading and painterly qualities that would be lovely in watercolor sketches. I only have this ink and a bottle of Sunset from Dominant Industry. I’ll have to explore this brand further.
The Quote
Yet a life of creativity is all about change — moving forward, taking chances, exploring new frontiers. “The real risk is in not changing,” said saxophonist John Coltrane. “I have to feel that I’m after something. If I make money, fine. But I’d rather be striving. It’s the striving, man, it’s that I want.” (emphasis mine)
One of the biggest challenges I have sometimes is embracing change. It’s kind of weird, because I highly value novelty, and I’m always seeking novel things and novel experiences. However, the introvert side of me has inertia and can dump me into ruts that are hard to break out of.
Especially now, as I’m looking for a new job, I’m currently wondering if I should pivot to the new role I want (which I sort of have done), or play it safe for now and do something I’m used to, in order to make the job search easier? On a given day, in a given hour, I argue for one option or the other. :sigh: Sure, current economic circumstances may dictate that going the safer route is beneficial at this time, but there may never be a “perfect” time to pivot to a new role, so why not now?
These are the internal arguments I’m having now. I don’t know what I’ll decide ultimately. But I’ll try to keep in mind that even if I don’t end up making a change now professionally, that I should strive for exploring new opportunities in my creative life so that at least some portion of my life is pushing forward and helping me grow. And hopefully that ends up spilling into my professional life as well, nudging me to take some chances there when I’m in a more advantageous situation (or not!).
Epilogue
Well! I completed my first 30 inks, 30 days project. It was pretty fun, as were previous 30-day artsy challenges I’ve done in the past. It was cool to shop my ink library and land on a theme of dusky inks, and then switch to another theme of autumnal inks when I didn’t quite have 30 dusky inks handy, heh.
I’m definitely glad I switched to using a long blade nib in a nib holder to write out my snippets instead of dipping a fountain pen, because it made clean up SO MUCH easier. It also felt kind of fun writing with a dip pen of sorts. And switching to the folded nib pen for the ink swatches was also a game changer, thanks to ease of use and cleaning. In fact, it has been so easy to swatch with the folded nib pen that I made a bunch of random ink swatches as I pondered which inks I might use, or if I just wanted to remind myself of what an ink looked like (I do not have a swatch library yet). It was a welcome workflow optimization. /CorpSpeak
I didn’t do a whole lot of planning for this project because every day I kind of wanted to see what ink I felt like using, and flipped through the Austin Kleon books to figure out what quote or snippet I wanted to write on the day. However, near the end, I did plan the order of the last few dusky inks, and the order of the fall inks to help make things quicker and minimize similar colors getting swatched back to back. The next time I do a 30 inks series, I’m not sure if I’ll fully plan out the order of inks, but I will take the learnings and refinements I made during this project and apply them as needed.
Next month is typically when some people do Inktober. I…am not sure whether I want to jump right into another 30-day challenge or give myself a break. Part of me wants to continue my momentum, but the other part of me would probably feel relieved not to be doing something every day for the next month. 🤔 The jury’s still out, but I really don’t have much time to ponder if I am going to do something for Inktober starting tomorrow!
Thank you all for checking out this blog series. I also want to thank Brad Dowdy for giving me a shout out on The Pen Addict podcast, episode 580, specifically for my 30 inks, 30 days project. That was super surprising, literally! I was behind on listening to the podcast and someone I know on Mastodon let me know about the shout out. 😊 I know the reader bump from his and other people’s referrals won’t last forever, but it’s been really fun to see so many people visiting my blog, following along. I hope some of you stick around. I’ll try my best to continue writing interesting posts about fountain pens, and about other stuff! 🙂
