In 2009, artist Jake Parker came up with the concept of Inktober as a way to hone his drawing skills through daily drawing prompts within the month of October. As time passed, it became a celebration of ink and by 2014, over 100,000 drawings were being posted with #Inktober.

Inktober has become an international sensation with people everywhere participating in the challenge, including Senior Adele Marchiando. Marchiando is not the typical Inktober artist, as she does her art digitally. However, since Inktober specifies that the art should be hand drawn due to the ink concept, Marchiando only does her art in greyscale to adhere to the rules.

“Black and white is how I do the ink part of it because I’m doing it digitally. It’s a pain because some of the prompts are so visual,” Marchiando said.

Even with this color handicap, she continues to digitally follow the prompts, which come in a wide variety ranging from cute to horrifying. Inktober has an official prompt list, but at this point, multiple people have come up with their own ideas as well. Marchiando enjoys following different prompt lists depending on how she’s feeling that day and what the official prompt is.

“I keep switching prompt lists as the official prompts are not what I want to draw this year. I just want to have a prompt for each day rather than having to come up with something,” Marchiando said.

She first learned about Inktober in 2016 as she had been attempting to undergo the challenge of daily drawing after watching a TED Talk on the benefits of drawing everyday. After that, it was only a matter of time before she ran out of ideas on what to draw and decided to undertake the challenge of Inktober.

“My favorite thing to draw is probably people. I draw people sitting or doing homework. It’s a bit of a journal so a lot of the time I draw paper, homework and tea,” Marchiando said.

She finds much of her inspiration in her daily life and uses it to fuel her artwork. When she first got started, her drawings were simply blank faces and now she’s brought her artwork to life with her lifelike drawn facial expressions.

Marchiando has done these challenges for over 800 days with no end currently in sight. She has fully embraced the Inktober spirit with the hopes of advancing her skills and at this point, has achieved her goal.