October, a month usually reserved for pumpkin spice and Halloween, is also the month where anybody with a pen and paper can participate in a month long event that challenges students to draw everyday of October.

OCSA Inks is an event recreated by 11th grade visual arts major Lisa Smith and Rohan Lofti. Everyday in the month of October, participants can create a drawing that is based on the prompt given that day.

“[We] wanted to make a problem free version and to make an event centered around OCSA to encourage the kids to participate” as stated by Lofti when asked about the origin of the event. These 2 students created an OCSA version of the popular internet event known as “Inktober” which is another month long event for artists where they’re given a word prompt for every day for the month of October. They created this event because Jake Parker, the creator of Inktober, plagiarized book prompts from another artist’s book for his own book called “Inktober All Year Long”.

Smith adds on to say that “Sometimes the original creator’s prompts were a little boring…so like what if we made our own?”

With this kind of reasoning, Lotfi and Smith proposed this idea to Patricia Calderon, Director of the Visual Arts Department, in late 2020. Since then the Visual Arts Department has been participating in this event. Even if this event was organized and made for visual artists, Lotfi and Smith encourages students of all kinds of majors to part take.

“It’s an event for people who want to learn new ways to ink better or just to draw things inspired by word prompts,” Lotfi adds.

These students also run an Instagram page called “ocsa.visualartists” where they showcase people’s submissions for each day and have access for the word prompts. “Everyone can do it. I feel that everybody is capable of doing art to any level they want to be at, it just takes practice,” Smith claimed. Anyone who participates in OCSA Inks, good luck and have fun drawing!