TIM BAKER

The second week of Inktober – and it’s a difficult week with some rather irritatingly fantasy themed prompts and now the shiny newness is over I’m struggling to juggle things. Not so much fatigue, more that 2-3am ‘do I really have to do this?’ angst which I solved by telling myself yes you bloody well HAVE to do this. But events have made it rather more trying this week.

First prompt was ‘frail’ – I thought of autumn leaves being fragile, but rather than just go to the local park for some reason I decided to go and do this in Richmond Park and setup a still-life on a bench. It’s nice, the weather will hold out surely, and the forecast says only light rain later on…WRONG. Cue deluge (as you can see a few of the pictures). Luckily I had my plastic Tuff Box so I sheltered under some trees with the deer until it had passed.

Second prompt was ‘swing’ and one of those I had to swerve because I am not going to draw pictures of swings. I am not Fragonard (actually thinking now a version of that would have been fun!). So I decided to so some experimental process drawing, swinging my arm left and right to create geometric shapes with all my pens in my pen bag in sequence (#3 was just the fine liners and not the brush pens). The contact between #1 and #2 working on reverse pages printed Swing #3 – Ghost on the opposite page. I love accidents like that.

As predictable, artists love this stuff but less so the general public. Well it has to be done…

‘Pattern’ slightly stumped me but again rather than last week I decided to brave the weather and try and do something live and not from photographs or abstract again. So off to Home Park near Hampton Court, I was going to draw the trees until I saw masses of large mushrooms growing in the fields, with concentric ring patterns on the top. Cue being driven dotty by all those dots! Unlike a few days before, the grumpy weather actually turned out nice just as the sun was going down…typical!

Next up was ‘snow’ – where I am in the UK it isn’t snowing – snow is rare in the UK this time of year, it’s usually wet. Horror images of far too many Frozen and way too early Xmassy scenes with snowmen plagued me, so I again like the first challenge ‘Ring’ I went abstract on Canford Card and the new Dr PH Martin Inks and India Ink to create an abstract blizzard. One that predictably took a day or so to dry! Is it drawing? Painting? Who cares.

Closeup like Ring it’s remarkably cosmological, like a Hubble space image. Yes that imagery is an influence of mine, use it all the time for covers.

Next up was one of those aforementioned ‘fantasy’ prompts, ‘Dragon’. Luckily I love Japanese and Chinese dragons, and inherited some bamboo chinese brushes from my mother who loved that style. so decided to copy a Hokusai. As last week, I did this in video which seems to have gone down well on Instagram and online generally – music as always is my own.

After the rather sad dragon (Japanese dragons seem to be rather stressed or worried! But I made mine more careworn) the next theme was ‘Ash’ – which I’m sure was intentional, so I did two more Sumi-e inspired ink paintings of their usual home, the volcano Mount Fuji based off various photographs I found online.

The first was done on a new square pad I’ve found that is for scrapbook work but seems to be as good if not better than Canford paper for ink. It was done with Dr PH Martin’s Bombay Ink and a little India Ink. This is scanned but the original has more gradations, the scan seems to have lost some of the subtlety.

The second I did was more traditional study with what John tells me is Japanese Maple. It was based off a combination of photos of the mountain, an artistic collage or mashup. The washes of Dr PH Martin’s Bombay Ink work well in the sky as does the granulation of the India ink for clouds. This like some of my other work combines partly random and partly intentional wet ink effects like dripping the wash downwards for the reflection.

Finally the theme for day 14 was ‘overgrown’ – I had planned to draw and paint the hedge in the garden because the leaves had turned a wonderful range of reds and golden reds. But again, the weather defeated me, but luckily I took some photos and worked from those. Here you can see the original dip-pen drawing with wash, and then the final piece using the Bombay Inks as watercolours.

I got some primary inks to see if I could mix them, the Dr PH Martin site and elsewhere does not tell you if they are intermixable to make new colours. I can confirm you can, but the non-primaries such as Golden Yellow – the thicker inks like the Yellow Ochre and Terracotta tend to make the resulting mix ink chalky, opaque or duller. Which has it’s uses. The hard thing about doing this was toning it down as the blue tends to still make it intense. The Violet helps here, but I suspect it’s best to use the inks more like gouache or acrylic or indeed oils and use white and black to create tonality.