Hello friends! It’s been a minute since I last posted. I have been overwhelmingly busy with projects the past couple of months. The main focus of my blog today will be my 2025 Inktober\Peachtober illustrations and my process behind them. For the past three years I have participated in “Inktober” – I write that in quotes because I never have followed the official Inktober list due to many reasons, some of which include issues with the creator of Inktober (Which I will not get into). Last year was my first year participating in Peachtober, (which is hosted by Furry Little Peach). I decided to participate again this year by picking a few of the prompts I liked – some of which included words such as: Kite, poppy, strawberry, and hatch.
Anyways, another Inktober is done with and I’m left with some illustrations that I’m quite content with. I approached the work quite differently from the previous years and I think it paid off. Last year I started to dabble with collage in my illustrations, this year I decided to do my entire body of work in a collage format. This allowed me to work with more colors and experiment with compositions. I worked with a limited palette of mostly blues and oranges. My go-to ink has been the Kakimori pigment inks – Karari and Toppuri are the color names. I used the Karari ink for my previous two Inktobers, I wanted to stick with a familiar and beloved art supply. For the orange bits I mostly used cut-outs of orange watercolor pieces. It was tedious work, there was a lot of waiting for things to dry, however, working in a collage format allowed me to work faster, I had more control over the outcome of each illustration since collage is such a piece by piece medium and adjustments can be made. I’ll post my favorite illustrations from this year down below. To see the whole body of work please visit my Instagram and my Tumblr (Which I will link below).
My next project is: Folktale Week. Stay tuned for more details!
Nicki Fortunati-Warren Arts 
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