So, for starters, I have an Instagram now. I don't know what I'm actually going to do with it; as you can see, there's almost nothing there so far. My vague idea was that it'd function mainly as a promotion tool for my webcomic, but ... we'll see. I'll probably post Inktober art and that kind of thing. My biggest goal was just to get used to the Instagram interface since so many art and comics people use it now.

And a weird interface it is, too. Instagram only accepts square photos, auto-cropping anything that isn't square, which is really difficult to get used to. Though I have now discovered that my phone camera has a square mode, so I guess I'll be using that quite a bit. It also doesn't have a desktop browser mode (you have to upload things through the mobile interface, though I also found instructions for getting your browser to enter fake mobile mode so you can still do things from the desktop) and you also can't download your own pictures, which is bonkers! Who does that? Well, you can, but only by putting in a support ticket to get a temp link to download your entire photo archive as a package. Jeez.

Anyway, I'm trying to get back into art a little bit. For my birthday this year, I treated myself to an art-supply-of-the-month subscription. I went with 3 months of Paletteful Packs (it auto-renews on a monthly basis, but I figured I'd give it three months and cancel if I wasn't getting my money's worth out of it) and the Inktober box from Artsnacks, a different subscription service.

So far, the Paletteful subscription has been pretty disappointing. It's not their fault; the art supplies are really nice, and beautifully presented. It's just that they've been picking mainly things I don't use. Their boxes are themed, and it just so happens that the first two boxes in a row were pencil-themed boxes, which is a medium that a) I don't do much with, and b) I already have an entire tackle box containing a million art pencils left over from college. There have been a few things I like and feel that I'll get use out of (a pad of Bristol paper, a nice pencil sharpener) but on the whole, their selections haven't really been my thing.

I'm really hoping the third box will be something other than pencils. If I like it, I may stick it out for a couple more months, but I'm starting to think Paletteful's curation just isn't geared toward my tastes. They've been sending large pads of paper, for example, and while that's nice and I will probably use it, especially the Bristol paper, I would much rather have small sampler packs so I can try out some different things. Or just nice paper in little sketchbooks.

The Inktober box, on the other hand, is AMAZING. I mean, I'm easy for ink supplies anyway because that's my medium, but they also included a really fantastic-looking sketchbook and a big box of colored brush pens. I don't plan to touch any of it until October, but it's going to be hard to wait because I'm really eager to dive in. I'm going to see if I can manage to make this the year that I actually do all of the days. I'm also going to try to use the official prompts this year.

Speaking of October prompting, I discovered a delightful thing on Tumblr: Whumptober, a.k.a. a list of hurt/comfort prompts for each day of the month. Direct link to the prompt list (as an image). I don't know if I'll actually do anything with it, but it's marvelously inspiring. Come to think of it, I could combine it with Inktober and kill gently maim two birds with one stone...