A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 3 — Exercise 2 — Using marks to create surface textures

This exercise involved recreating the textured surfaces of objects.

This first page has a drawing trying to replicate the texture of patio tiles, and another showing the branches and remaining leaves of a tree that had lost its leaves during winter — as viewed from the patio whilst looking across the garden. I painted the watercolour wash over the ink drawing in the evening, and thought I was using a brownish grey colour but when I checked in the light of day the next day, I’d actually used a purple colour. Oops. So the colours are not 100% accurate but hopefully the feel of the texture shows through:

The second group of drawings are of the leaves on a pencil pine. At first I thought the segments of the leaves were like little nodules, so I drew the first one (top right) with drops of ink, but when I looked closer I noticed that there were small crosses along the leaves segmenting the sections. I thought this would suit cross-stitch, so tried to draw it in inks and then paint over the top. the problem I found is I couldn’t mix the correct lighter shade of green to draw the crosses. On the weekend I only had my inks and bamboo pens as I was away for the weekend. When I came home I painted the crosses on, though my technique isn’t that good — and probably the paintbrush I used wasn’t fine enough, so the crosses are a bit rough:

The last one is trying to replicate the textures on a root of an Agapanthus plant. These plants are a pest in the native garden so J pulls them out whenever possible. He was showing me the shoots coming out of the root. I thought it had a nice mixture of textures — smooth surfaces, hard and soft parts, fibrous, stringy parts and soft leaves. Also I liked the concentric ridges around the root — it reminded me of how I actually draw a cylindrical surface on paper.

Even though the Agapanthus root is quite ugly, I quite like how this textural drawing turned out.

A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 3 — Exercise 1 — Using marks to create surface textures

This exercise involved using marks to create surface textures — working from visual sources.

For these exercises I used pages from a magazine – “belle” magazine, june/july 2013

This first one is trying to replicate the textured rug, using graphite and charcoal pencils:

For the second drawing I was trying to replicate the soft, blurred, smudged look of the glass. The blue definitely worked better than the yellow glass. The yellow paint was too wet and just came out as flat colour.

In the third one, I tried to replicate the curves. I didn’t have silver pens or paints so I used blue Copic pens for this attempt:

A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 2 — Exercise 4

This exercise involved making marks with many other types of materials.

Block printing — a wine bottle box + softdrink bottle cap with ink stamp pad:

Layers of coloured water based oil pastel crayons with scratchings using a bamboo pen:
I like this one – the colours peeking through seem quite electric – almost neon. I think it’s because of the surrounding black colour making them ‘pop’

Watercolours and acrylics with vinegar:
I think I used too much vinegar. there’s a few nice artefacts from the vinegar but overall I don’t think these worked out how I was expecting them to.

Brusho paint powders mixed with vinegar instead of water, brusho powder dropped onto the page, ink pen lines using a bamboo pen:
there’s a few splotches where the colour was lifted by the vinegar. I don’t mind the ink lines over the paint, but I think I need to practice the vinegar effects more.

Crayons (Text zoom windup crayons) with a watercolour paint wash over the top.
I liked the top one, so I made another full size picture of it – see the next picture:

Combing: black acrylic paint with scratchings using a dressmaking pin:
I like this one – the black acrylic reminds me of black satin. I like how shiny it looks.

I retried some of the exercise 3 exercises – ie placing salt on the wet paint, placing plastic wrap over the paint, as well as some of the suggested exercises for exercise 4:

Inks with plastic wrap – this one didn’t really work. I think the ink dried too quickly:
I preferred the pre-plastic for this one. I should have kept it aside and tried another — though I did take a “before” and “after” photo.

Collage:

Acrylic paint + bleach:

Acrylic paint + salt:

Acrylic paint + scratchings using a seed pod:

Ink + bleach:

Watercolour paints + salt:

Ink + salt:

Acrylic + scratchings using a sewing pin:

Cutout stencil – simple shapes:

Stencil – stippling and sponging paint onto the stencil:

Frottage / rubbings:
I made quite a few rubbings — with different results. Some didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. Plus I realized that my apartment is full of smooth surfaces! I had to do some at J’s Mum’s place where there were many textures to be found.

A Creative Approach — Project 1 Marking marks — Stage 2 — Exercise 3

This exercise involved repeating exercise 1 using a wider range of materials — paints, coloured pencils, crayons, sticks, brushes, sponges, etc.

I started this exercise again tonight (08/07) and am much happier with how the marks and explorations are turning out. when I began this class, I was “stuck” when doing the drawing and mark-making exercises and working in a journal. I watched the Example: Mark Making (No 1) video after reading the Keeping Sketchbooks article and related articles and then I started a couple of Sharon Boggon’s online classes – Artists Studio Journal: A Designers workhorse (began 22nd May) and Sumptuous Surface Embroidery (began 2 weeks later). I haven’t finished the embroidery class yet but have the notes to continue with later. both classes were really great – and a huge help for me in doing this class. we had to do similar exercises for the studio journal class as for this OCA class, but I found that the feedback from other students and Sharon and her assistant Tahlia was very helpful. it led me to doing some more of the explorations below. also, I signed up for an art class on coursera.org and the introduction video exercises were helpful too.

I just discovered Winsor & Newton inks and an Hake bamboo stick – love this! Especially the last two on this page

These are using Winsor & Newton inks and pen nibs of different sizes. On the second page I wet the paper first in some of them and then made drops on the page and the inks spread out like little fractal splotches. I love this effect.

 

This one is using charcoal pencils – light, medium, dark and white:

Another using charcoal pencils:

These are using sketching crayons:

These three are using Brusho paint powders and water sprayed onto the paper. I love this effect also, though I prefer it when the paint is still wet and glossy. it loses some of the effect once the paper dries. I will look into a way of trying to preserve the “wet-look” of these. (these were made over the weekend 30/06)

These two are the Brusho paint powders, water and Aquawax as patterns in the background as a resist:

Brusho paint powders, water and Aquawax:
This one had a “puddle” of paint on the edge of the page which looked nice when it was wet. I don’t think it looks as nice once the ink has dried, so now I’m keeping this in mind so I can soak up the excess paint or move it across the page if there are any more puddles.

These are the older, first attempts – using coloured pens and paints
coloured pens and China ink pens:

Pens:

Pens:

Oil pastel crayons and water wash:

Indian ink and pens:

Watercolour pencils, water, pens:

This is using watercolour pencils & water & salt — but the watercolours dried so quickly that the salt didn’t draw up any of the paint:

This was using watercolour paint, applied more thickly. I don’t think the salt crystals were large enough so it didn’t really work either:

The third attempt was using salt with thicker watercolour:

This is thickly applied watercolour paints (tube) with glad wrap/plastic wrap scrunched on it whilst it’s drying. I’m not happy with how this one worked out either — there is a couple of nice marbling effects on it, but I thought it would create more of them. Next time I will try with acrylic paints.

I tried it again – watercolours and gladwrap:

Pens: