My first endeavour was one I'd been thinking about all week. Having seen quite a few indian ink studies recently by fellow students, I thought it was about time I tried the medium, as I usually only use disposable drawing pens in terms of ink. I also chose to use a brush, which up until now I've avoided in case I got sidetracked into painting when I should be doing coursework!
I decided to follow up on the reflected light and shade exercise for this and placed two tankards side by side in the window.
I mixed up several strengths of ink in a palette before starting, and briefly sketched the outlines in pencil before inking. It took a while to get the right amount of ink and water on the brush, and it behaved rather like watercolour- a medium I dislike. It was only after i'd finished that I realised how wrong the left side of the left-hand tankard is, possibly because it had a fair amount of light bouncing onto it from the window and wall and I misjudged the profile. The most effective bit is the handle of the right-hand tankard, in fact, the other could have done with some stronger tones on the handle too. However, I was fairly pleased with it as a first effort in ink.
Changing track, I picked out some pieces of pot pourri and arranged them in a loose group. I wanted to practice concentrating on the outlines rather than on what I was drawing, and the only way to develop this technique is to do it over and over until it starts to become second nature. I can feel I'm getting better at it, and was pleasantly surprised how all the elements came out more or less as they looked and in their correct relative positions. (Especially the complicated woven twig ball!) I decided to shade in the shadows in order to anchor the pieces to the surface- they looked a bit abstract without them.
Next up was the shopping trip as I wanted some watercolour paper on which to work with my coloured pencils, and while we were in town I went to a couple of nearby charity shops to scout for useful still life accessories. One shop I find always seems to have a good selection of art books, and I was delighted to find a clearly laid out manual on drawing domestic animals, for a fraction of the price I would otherwise have had to pay.
Also, hidden away on the shelf, was a charming old cloth-bound book "Hints for Sketching Trees from Nature in Water Colours". It's a 16th edition of a guide published by George Rowney and Co, with no imprint page to tell the date of publication, but the catalogue pages in the back state that prices are correct as of April 1st 1919! A red sable brush, size 4, would have set you back 1s (that's 5p in today's money) although there is a rider that sable price was fluctuating. I particularly like the Victorian style of prose, complete with capitalisation of key words, and I'm also sure that some useful advice can be gleaned from it which is still relevant today. There are a number of charming sepia plates in it by way of illustration.
Having arrived back home somewhat lighter in the wallet than when I left, I returned to work with a dragon fruit and soon discovered that the shape was far more challenging than I had at first thought, eventually, after well over three hours, I managed to bring it to some sort of completion before I lost the remaining daylight.
Hopefully I may have enough time to do a colour study of this later this week. And yes- I realise I'm jumping forward into Assignment 2 areas! Watch this space...
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