Acrylic Ink

After my outing with James last Monday I've been looking into different inks to use in the Aquash Water Brush. I was using the Rowney Drawing Ink, but the shellac in it was bunging up the brush. so then I tried Dr. Ph. Martin's concentrated water colour which was much more friendly. I got this in blue though as the big black pot was expensive and I didn't really like the results. So then I got FW Acrylic Artists Ink (black) and it's great. The aquash brush seems to have an airtight seal so the brush never dries out and the ink worked well with the brush. Below is a drawing done using the FW ink and a Faber-Castell artist pen then fiddled about with a bit in photoshop.


Here I just started drawing to see what would happen. All done with an art pen.

Draw or die

This week has been fairly eventful drawy wise. On Friday I went to see Scarlett and Faith's new addition "Tynan". The little bugger is a handsome chap, much more handsome than my clumsy penmanship can capture unfortunately (sorry Tynan). NB: He's not a conjoined twin, I just drew him twice on the same page.

The weekend was eaten up doing film work. On Monday, the talented James Mayhew, who teaches on my course, and myself wandered the streets of cambridge sketching and righting wrongs. I'll have to use the Uni scanner to scan them in as my scanner is too small, so I'll post them up another time. It was a fun and useful outing, even though I'm not terribly impressed with my results. James got me to use some new drawing materials which led on to:

Brush and Ink work. On Monday I tried this for the first time and the results were sketchy to say the least, but something seemed to interest me about it. Today we had life drawing and I mostly used the clever 'water in the handle' brushes and some indian ink.



This one below I did with one dip, meaning I dipped the brush into the ink once and didn't put anymore on after that. I think this is my favourite. I might even go as far as to say I like this.

This one underneath was made using a fat Derwent 8B thing James lent me. I quite like this, it's like my other 8B I've talked about before but much fatter.

Fiddle

My first collage image. This is an interpretation of a fragment of Radiohead's 'Sail to the moon'. The stars are shiny Christmas wrapping cut outs. I used paper cut-outs, pen and ink, conte pastels and graphitone.


A row of houses using sepia pencil and conte pastels.

There's a light in here somewhere

More life drawing. Life drawing is always rewarding to do, even if the results aren't rewarding to look at. I've gone at these in different ways:

The first I scratched out in pen and then went over roughly using the graphitone.

This one I used the same pen and graphitone but tried to be more economical with line and tone.


Dipped ink using a flat edged pen.


I still don't feel like I've found a way to capture what I see in a way I like yet. I found an illustration book in the 2nd year BA Illustration student's room the other day and found a few inspirational images that go someway towards where I want to be. And a girl in my class, Biddy, showed me some work by a French artist called Nicolas De Crecy, who has worked with Sylvain Chomet, and that's been very useful. I still feel like I'm in the dark looking for that light switch though.

Outside the Circus

We had a little field trip to the circus and this is one of the drawings I made. Probably the best technical drawing I've done but very dead.

Costume Life Drawing

This was all using the Graphitone 8B pencil again. I drew it very lightly and then boosted the contrast in photoshop.

Various

This was my second attempt at watercolour work and predated the picturehouse painting. I think this is the least rubbish watercolour I've done. Probably because it was new and I enjoyed it more.


Some toys (borrowed from Jon and Erica) drawn in line.


One of the life drawing students drawn in charcoal. It's very messy I know, but I'm trying different ways of capturing form.

Cambridge Arts Picture House

I haven't posted for a while because I've not really felt inspired to blog. The images here are from about two weeks ago. Eva Nowak (a former house mate and quite talented filmmaker) was kind enough to let me wander the cinema.

First one here is a watercolour of the kiosk area. A great friend of mine was once eaten by the Ben&Jeery's Ice Cream machine here.


Roger (thanks Erica!) the top projectionist fellow, drawn from memory in Ink and then quickly 'toned' using photoshop.


Inside the projection room it's quite long, snug and loud. This was done in charcoal and then restored using photoshop (I haven't fixed it on the paper yet)