My silhouette is stationary...

I was looking forward to a weekend of vegetation. The plan was to get home on Friday and turn into furniture until Monday morning. But I woke up yesterday fizzing with energy, I couldn't keep still and the intense, delicate drawing that's consumed my January so far was definitely not the place to channel it. I needed to chuck ink about with no consideration for the end product (or the upholstery). I've used this technique before and I'm not going to say it works marvellously or that I love it, but it satisfies a need every now and again. I paint the shadows with masking fluid; ink in the whites then remove the masking. So here's my favourite from the cutting room floor, an experimental spaceboy. I've added a bit of black and white pen here and there this morning because I just cant leave things alone. I'm throwing him out there, because you don't know what you've got till someone tells you...

This is how it feels to be small...

This idea (or something like it) has been rattling around the inside of my skull like a beetle in a bottle for some time now. I like the idea of drawing collections; hundreds of the-same-but-different items like you'd find in a museum. In practice I probably don't have the attention span for it, although I do really love to draw insects over and over again. Natures sparkling gems that I'd like to train to stay still on the lapel of my jacket when I go out like a pet/jewellery combo...I digress, back to the drawing: as I said, the idea was a museum collection and I was going to house them in a case with labels but when it came down to it, I couldn't bear them to be locked up or worse...So mine are alive and free but they can't read so hopefully they've put themselves into the right order (the artist cannot be held responsible for discrepancies in the name tags). They're also happy to sit while you look at them, just don't stay too long they're ready for a tea break.

Just for fun I thought I'd colour them with acrylic ink, I'll leave this open to interpretation but I know what I think...

The sun that pins the branches to the sky...

Don't be fooled by the simplicity of this, it felt like it was never going to end. I seem to have developed a ridiculously time consuming (and wholly unnecessary) technique of cross-hatching in biro to create large areas of blackness, then finding it not quite black enough and going over it with a brush pen. I know what you're thinking, why not just go straight in with the brush pen? No. It just doesn't feel black enough. And anyway, it's all about process, not product. I like the painstaking method, it's immersive. 

This is an almost literal interpretation of a scene I saw back in February or maybe March when I turned out of my street and the Sun was red and huge, burning behind the leafless trees like they were about to catch on fire. It could actually be a blood moon too depending on how you want to view it but I thought it was time our local star got a tribute (in orange and magenta acrylic ink), one last image of winter as the planet tilts into spring.

Just gotta know if I'm wastin' my time...

This wasn't what I had planned today. This isn't even the skull I'm meant to be drawing at the moment. Ignore what they say about procrastination...white ink is the real thief of time. There I was wrapping a parcel when this little light bulb flashed on, a skull in white ink on that brown, scrappy paper. And then all other items on the agenda ceased to be. (Just to clarify, I didn't draw this on the parcel, that would be some freaky ebaying!)

I started off with just a skull shape brushed on in diluted ink, which looked quite ethereal and ghostly and sort of worked in it's own way. I suppose you want to see it now? Here you go:

Then I remembered a sepia coloured pen I never really got on with and thought "where are you, my old nemesis?" (Yes I do talk to inanimate objects, what of it?) Pen found and many dots later I had a little skull. I'm not sure on the perspective but I wanted to use the natural way the ink had settled as the cracks and fissures in the bone, maybe some shadow underneath would have helped to anchor it down...I quite like how the paper has wrinkled though. It gives it energy, it was done quickly and it's nice that that shows. It's not perfect and neither am I. 

PS, if you're a pen weirdo, here's the pens I used:

I want you to notice when I'm not around...

It feels like such a long time since I've been here. A week is a long time in politics...I kind of lost all creative ability for a few days which was an almost physically painful experience. I'm starting to pull myself back together with some more acrylic ink experimentation, like a reverse Rorschach test: the ink tells me what it wants to look like by virtue of random colour mixing. I don't tend to have favourites amongst things that aren't immediately finite but if I had a ray gun to my head and had to choose a colour I'd possibly go for the blue-grey of Nuthatch wings. It's uplifting and melancholic at the same time. I like it best when it fills the sky and tells you "this day could go either way." 

A slice of life...

Sometimes it's just too hard to maintain the level of intensity required for fine detail, sometimes the ink needs to run, sometimes the art needs to make itself and let me know when it's done. But even then I can't just let things be. 

This was an experiment in acrylic ink. Shall I explain how I did it? Sigh...oh, alright then. The paper was wet and the ink diluted and dotted on with a brush from the centre. It was quite mesmerising to watch such unexpectedly concentric circles forming and it was nice to get lost in the swirl, the bleeding of each layer into the next. Some additions with a very fine brush and a slightly more saturated ink solution created the odd darker line here and there. But what exactly was it? Newton's rings? Ripples on water? Magnetic field lines? I knew I'd have to work into it somewhere with the biro, I couldn't leave it alone so it became a sliced tree showing it's growth rings with ballpoint bark on the outside. I've tried not to overdo it and just keep the pen to the edges, the ink effect is very subtle in places but that's ok. Maybe you see something different...

Come on let's crawl...

I really love these shield bugs (yes, apparently they're officially bugs not beetles). This little fella landed on me back in the days when the sun shone, so I quickly took a picture before he flew away because I knew I'd end up drawing him. I seem to come back to dots when I draw insects but this is what you might call mixed media. Oooh, branching out! Here we have dots in fineline pen; acrylic ink then not one but two shades of green ballpoint. Oh yes, my friends, acid green biro exists in the world, rejoice! I'd drawn this and inked it up but I really wasn't feeling it so once again it was neglected for a few weeks until I recalled the existence of the green pens (after stating that I had no use for green pens). Now he's a sparkling peridot. Quite a bit more vibrant than the real life bug but wouldn't we all add a bit of glimmer if we were to illustrate ourselves? Don't get used to it, I'll be back in black soon enough. 

Experimentation is an active science...

More dots...I told you it was habit forming! Along with a rarer thing for me, colour.

These little ladies are something I began with good intentions and then promptly misplaced. Having found them again, I decided they either had to go or be finished, so here they are. Ladybirds given a revamp in new, far out costumes. I was going for a sort of experimental ladybird test card using the CMYK colour model that printers use; cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Don't think I'm all techy, I just looked that up. It was an excuse to try out my newly acquired acrylic inks, that's all. They're not very symmetrical or evenly spaced (I just went for it freehand in pen...on wallpaper, which seemed like a good idea at the time) and the colours have bled outside the edges but I quite like them because of that rather than despite it. I don't usually wear rose tinted spectacles to look at my own work but they've made me show these off when I really wasn't going to. I'd better take them off again before anything else weird happens!

Carrying around an empty head...

Now, I'm not really the macabre type but when I came across the delicate, fragile treasure of a bird skull on the coast at Flookburgh I just had to bring it home. It's some kind of little wading bird, though there's so many that look identical to the untrained eye, I couldn't tell you what it is (any twitchers out there, answers on a postcard). I really didn't have any intention of drawing it but I never had any intention of drawing anything, I just don't know what else to do with my hands..

Once I started I got a bit carried away and drew it quite a lot of times, which is an incredibly rare occurrence for my non-existent attention span. These are my favourites, drawn in dots (which is a bit habit forming, consider that fair warning!) Some people refer to this technique as pointilism but strictly speaking, it's stippling, which sounds like a style of painting to me. Although it's pointilism that is actually a painting technique. Confused? Yeah, me too. I'm just going to call it drawing with millions of dots. Genius! Like magnified subatomic particles. Actually, nothing like that at all.

This one is my favourite, the underside. These drawings are quite a bit bigger than the real life skull, I can scarcely believe it once housed a miniature brain. 

A Moon age daydream...

Tonight's moon is known as a Hunters Moon which is the full moon that comes after the Harvest Moon (and that's a lot of moons in one sentence..) It won't be quite as exciting as the supermoon total eclipse we got last month (if you didn't get up at 2am to catch that, what were you playing at?) which gave us a deep, burnt, blood-red moon that looked to me, as it neared totality, as though there were flames licking up the sides trying to catch it on fire. Just stunning! But it's drawings (not moon related digression) that we're here for, so without further ado...

Sticking with the white on black theme, here's something I've been working on this week. Our beautiful Moon drawn in millions of tiny white dots. This is actually part of a bigger drawing so more will be revealed. Stay tuned. Do not adjust your set. 

Inktober

#inktober

I've just found out about this inktober thing (on the 26th...story of my life!), which coincided quite nicely with starting this blog and with splattering white acrylic ink around the "studio" yesterday. I was going for a bit of a Ralph Steadman vibe after seeing him the other night on a programme about Edward Lear. I've always loved his far out art... Anyway, I thought my splatters looked a bit like fish skeletons so here's one (with the crappy tail bit craftily edited out of the photo). I'm also kind of glad I've only just discovered inktober, there's no way I would have committed myself to an ink drawing every single day for a month! I was bored before I even began..(thanks Morrissey).

Before I change my mind...

Welcome. It's nice to have you here. I'm so glad you could come. I hope you like it...I think you will (thanks Willy Wonka). To avoid agonising over the perfect drawing to start with, I've decided to just go for it and keep it simple with this little Dor beetle. Leave 'em wanting more...