had a day set aside this past week to do some playing with my ink and a few new art materials but a summer cold zapped almost all of my creative energy
i showed up at my work table at the appointed hour where the materials were waiting for me but all I wanted to do was turn around and go find a comfy chair and a blanket
still... there was a sheet of acrylic paper marked off into various-sized sections and a brand new intense indigo block waiting for me along with a few inks and my fountain pen
i began with the indigo, then a bit of water followed by a black art graf tailor's chalk and then my fountain pen
every so often a bit of water was added to the page, then sepia ink, and whilst things ran together in interesting ways, the mountains i had envisaged did not materialize and it was all beginning to look like a mess
thinking white acrylic paint might help, i added a bit to a couple of squares with a palette knife but it was awful so i quickly blotted off as much as i could with a paper towel
a bottle of white acrylic ink was lurking at the back of my worktable so i gave it a good shake whilst looking over what i had done thus far, waiting a few minutes for all of it to begin drying
giving the ink a good shake and then using the applicator, I made some gestural marks in each of the sections
a short time later they were dry so i peeled off the masking tape and had a look at what i'd done
not terribly impressive, not at all
and no mountains... but, knowing you just have to keep moving forward, i cut them all apart
odd how separating them, allowing each to stand on it's own changes thing
isolation is a very important design tool and one i learned early on to keep at my fingertips
taking each in turn, looking at them this way and that, turning them, looking at them from all sides
it never fails to amaze me how much that simple act can totally transform something
every single one looked better in a different orientation than the one it was created in
this first image is the "right way up"
and now with a 180 degree turn
the next two were both turned once to the right - they look like winter trees
love the snowy branches
my four favourites
working in this random, gestural way may seem like an odd way to create but i couldn't have painted these if i tried
labouring over them as I iould have done would have made them contrived and stilted; instead, by just playing with ink and marking tools, being ok with not achieving what i hoped for and looking to see what else might be, i found something beautiful and inspiring
3 comments:
Winter trees... yes! Stunning! I can't see mountains but the top two look like water to me. Perhaps a rushing stream cutting through a mountain landscape. I love this... well done for showing up and moving your stuff around the paper.. Beautiful work!
Yes, this is very much the sort of thing that can be beautiful if it has that little bit of freedom, but loses everything if you try too hard. It can be very tricky to get the balance just right - maybe you need to be floored by a cold!
Sometimes the best things come through happenstance - and these are a good case in point. Most of us would have scuttled the whole thing but you carried on and came out the other side with something beautiful.
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