Every year on Instagram, artists of all kinds participate in #Drawtober, an art challenge consisting of six prompts spread out over the month of October. This year, the Drawtober crew has rounded up their top prompts from the last ten years for one last hurrah.
Now, I cannot draw. But my sister, Emily Pillard, can. She and I have collaborated for the past four years to create stories accompanied by beautiful illustrations. We’re at it again for the fifth year in a row with a brand new story and stunning artwork.
Read on to discover the whole story! And don’t miss out our 2025 story “Dark Fairytale,” 2024 story “Monster Mash,” our 2023 story “Haunted House,” and a series of micro-stories for the 2022 theme, “Season of the Witch!”
Drawtober 2026: Witch’s Garden
Pumpkins were particularly hard for her. Oh, they always looked fine—rotund and perfectly colored. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was what you found inside the gourd, for Nellie’s pumpkins often grew with strange innards—hungry mosses or strange spiders or sometimes simply rotten. In the years that she had been growing pumpkins in the garden, she had never managed to grow a normal one.
None of that would do for tonight. She needed a good pumpkin, the perfect pumpkin, in fact, to carve for the Master of Revels.