WITCHTOBER – Witch Themed Art Challenge

September 26, 2023

Witchtober – initially created as Inktober’s alternative, grew popular and became its own, independent art challenge. What mysteries surround it? Learn more about this challenge and join the fun!

Through past years, Witchtober prompt lists varied a lot from each other. They were spooky, funny, creative and interesting, but they all have one in common – witches. This challenge is very fun to take part in, as well as look through works, since unlike other challenges, here works might be quite similar. The interpretations of one character, drawn by many people at the same time are interesting to scroll through and look at.

I hope that this challenge will not only inspire you to create but will also put you in the Halloween mood!

What is Witchtober?

Witchtober is an art challenge in which participants are supposed to draw or paint witches. It’s inspired by Halloween, and takes place in the month of October. Its name is a combination of two words: witch and October.
The main goal is to paint a witch (or witch-related prompt) every day for a month (31 days).

It goes mostly under two hashtags – #witchtober and #31witches (+ occasionally, a hashtag of the prompt list’s creator)
It’s often linked to another art challenge: Inktober, and presented as an alternative prompt list to those who don’t like official Inktober prompts. Therefore, we can often see also #Inktober hashtag used in Witchtober artworks.

As Inktober’s alternative, many people participating in Witchtober use rules from Inktober (Make a drawing in ink).
As an independent challenge: There are no rules to what media can be used (it can be traditional and digital media).

Like most similar challenges, witchtober has its own prompt lists; however, there’s no “official prompt list”, or regular rules. Everyone who wants to participate in witchtober, needs to find the prompt list that suits them the best and simply start working 🙂

Witchtober Prompt List 2023

There is no official website, Instagram or any site that we could treat as the reference, so really this challenge is very elastic and open for anyone that wants to participate.
In this section, you will find a few Witchtober prompt lists for 2023 created by various artists. You can use them to participate in this challenge – please remember to include also the creator’s hashtag!

by @willowandroxas

Who created Witchtober?

When it comes to the origins of the challenge, it was probably started in 2016 by a user called Ochibrochi. It’s the oldest mention of full prompt list I found + it was also the most popular list this year. Ochibrochi made their own alternative prompt list for Inktober, following the theme of witches.

*This list is still being used. If you are new to Witchtober, you can freely use this list to participate in this challenge.

source: ochibrochi.tumblr.com

At the beginning, mainly the #31Witches was the hashtag that was associated with this challenge. Later #Witchtober started to be added while publishing the artworks on social media. Gradually, the art challenge became known as the “Witchtober”, and #31witches hashtag had rather fallen into disuse.

*I saw the hashtag #31Witches is still being used by artists who use Ochibrochi’s prompt list mentioned in this section.

“31Witches” Art Challenge

There were attempts to create official pages for Witchtober under the name “31Witches”, where an official prompt list created by Ochibrochi would be published every year. Also, these accounts were a place where artists could share their artworks. There were 3 prompt lists published in total: 2016 (#31witches), 2017(#31witches2) and 2018(#31witches3).

Tumblr: 31witches.tumblr.com
Twitter: @31_witches
Instagram: @31_witches

Unfortunately, these accounts are abandoned (last update was in 2018).

Witchtober Past Prompt list

In this section, you will find past prompt lists created in previous years.
Some of the prompt lists are similar to each other, and some even repeat every year, but here are a couple of the most interesting ones that we managed to find.

by @willowandroxas

by @qusquared

by Arturo Rose

Witchtober Artworks

Here are some fantastic artworks created for Witchtober! As always, it’s difficult for me to include here only few artworks, but I hope that they will be enough to inspire you to join the Witchtober. I’ve included direct links to the artworks under images, please click on the author (or title) if you would like to see more drawings created by the artist!

“The witches” by Blad Morana