TIM BAKER

Dreadlock Holiday by 10cc was on my mind during this session, the model had long locks which made the session interesting and rather hard for accurate drawing because of the short pose times. But I adapted with using drips and more of the abstract ‘Negative Space’ series to help portray her. Seems to be a current theme, drowning my works in water and creating drips.

Taking things away rather than adding them…

Some more quill drawings as well, in this session I tried a new technique – partly because I was unhappy with it, you see my destructive urges again – and pretty much washed most of the marks away, leaving a ‘ghost’ of the ink marks. I really like that technique, again it looks like etching or printing but purposefully destroying what you’ve done, taking away the ink rather than adding it, kind of the reverse approach of the Negative Space series but a similar result. Also more drips!

I did another of the Negative Space watercolours (Rorschach vs Negative Space – yes I even mashup my artistic themes), which I think works well. I got some larger markers and filled them with the marking fluid as you can get refills from Molotow. I can report, it works perfectly fine in empty markers and now means I can use brush pens, 15mm pens and 4mm pens as well as the 2mm marking pen for my ‘negative marks’

So I experimented with using it with Posca (the detail above, and the full image below) and in another work below with magenta acrylic ink & an unknown black ink I have in one of my refilled markers (I think it’s cheap drawing ink). I love the abstract nature of these – as much about what isn’t in the images than the marks within, white space, negative space.

Again taking away from the image after the fact, removing parts, like a ghostly image that comes to the fore. Removing the marking fluid from what is basically sugar paper is fun though!

Also started with the usual charcoal drawings – and experimented with mixing the quill drawing in indian ink with loose wet-on-wet watercolour, in which I found the ink floated into large particle chunks, like a sort of leopard-skin effect, more so than usual if you add watercolour. I like it. Like all the Rorschach Series it’s hard to control though.