TIM BAKER

And finally Inktober is over! I made it to the end on my first year, which I am pretty proud of but I found it hard – exhaustion and prompt fatigue set in a few times, and life got in the way a few times other. I know I made it hard for myself by ‘going large’ and making each prompt a big piece, but the idea for me was to not only get into the habit of working regularly, but also showcase what I can do. It seems to have worked!

Day 22 and the prompt was ‘ghost’. I was doing Portraits in the Pub (the event that’s stepped in while Drink & Draw goes on hiatus) that night at the Lamb in Surbiton and Jake was modelling so I decided to do some ghostly white on black action, with the Dr PH Martin Bombay White Ink. The final drawing I wasn’t happy about, so I added drips of Indian Ink in the sink to ‘erase’ the image, and that worked. I will be posting that full set of P@TP pics shortly.

The next day was ‘ancient’ – that was easy, given I live in a house full of old things and that’s just my jokes! Most of those things are not mine though, John has an Ancient Greek pot which I think dates from around 400-500BC. It’s a terror to try and dust around and no idea how or if you can clean it (?) but anyway, I did two still life pieces coupled with an old french olive oil bottle. The first was the watercolour using the Pentel Arts brush pen, which was recommended by Jake Parker who runs Inktober.

(Short review – the pen is great, I like the re-usable nature with cartridges as many pens aren’t refillable which is annoying. Difficult for me to get a solid stroke but partly because I am fairly new to this brush ink stuff, and also I was using watercolour paper which has texture).

It worked well but I felt it wasn’t ‘inky’ enough – yes I know you can stretch Inktober, it’s in the rules to be creative with the prompts and definitely I stretched it in my month from ink painting to markers – so I did a second using a dip-pen and the Jackson’s ink, which *I* heartily recommend if you’re using the expensive W&N inks and want a decent permanent waterproof Indian Ink. Oddly I prefer the looser first version, despite the ‘scratchy/paint’ nature of the ink strokes, but it was good practice.

Next was ‘dizzy’ – yes my head was spinning, like a whirlpool about this prompt. Head full of Vic Reeves and Wonderstuff lyrics, I struggled with this one, and again was heading to the life drawing session run by Robin Rutherford so decided to see if I could come up with something that expressed being dizzy. This Dr PH ink ‘painting’ came closest, it looks like she’s just fallen down – I will post the full set with Rosalyn after I’ve worked through the month (!) backlog.

Then on Day 25 the prompt was ‘tasty’. Tasty?! I am against instagramming meals, and that I’ve decided includes drawing or painting them (rules are meant to be stretched, as you’ll see later on, but that wasn’t a meal!). So I decided to draw an empty plate and cup and title it ‘The meal was so tasty I ate it!’.

I used my Vivienne Westwood (knock-off?) mug of the infamous two cowboys for a bit of queer/punk history. Appropriate if it is a dodgy copy, cos I thougthn it was Tom of Finland but the cowboys was actually directly ripped from Jim French for COLT magazine. It’s gay porn, basically, very odd that punks used to wear that as they weren’t as queer-friendly as some later made out, despite what Jon Savage says…women had a hard enough time in punk, let alone LGBTQ – despite it definitely coming from those people. Iinspiration as always was from misfits and dropouts and the alienated, but then becomes big and trendy and they get pushed out. Same old story.

Anyway this isn’t a lesson on punk’s appropriation of queer culture, it’s Inktober! The next prompt was ‘dark’ and the clocks had just changed back, so another still life, cos still life is all I ever do (congrats Dog Man Star at 25!). This time of various clocks, because of course when the clocks go back, you gotta get ready (to change them all). As always lyrics are in my head as I do these things. so this turn it was Culture Club to add a title. Kirk would be proud.

So as well as getting dark this time of year, it also gets cold. So appropriate the next prompt was ‘coat’ so I drew/painted my Harry Brown coat I found cheap at TK Maxx last year that I’d dug out to wear during the cold snap. Another outing for the Pentel Brush Pen, and the Dr PH Inks. Toning them down is hard, yes they are this bright!

Day 28 and the theme was ‘Ride’ – great because I ride all the time on trains and buses. I had to go into town for Negativland’s first gig ever in this country (sorta, a few of them did a gig with Wobbly a while back but not promoted as Negativland). Great to see them, and coincidentally I’d just got a A5 black ‘media pad’ from Clairefontaine as a free gift on an order – were they reading my mind?

So I got some white pens – a Posca 1MR fine liner and Molotow One4All 127HS 1mm which are both excellent and went to work, well play on the South Western Railways and Overground. I get self conscious and anxious in social settings so it was a big thing for me to spend 20-30 minutes on these as the Overground train filled up…headphones on!

On the 29th Day The Man Saw The Prompt, And The Prompt Wasn’t Good. Well ‘injured’? Really? It’s what you make of it though, so I went full circle (haha) from the first video for Ring and decided to do a slasher tribute and attack the work. Literally with a knife…

Not sure the action painting/knife drawing was successful but a lot of fun! Definitely NOT in the spirit of Inktober but by this point I’d stopped caring. I was going to actually tear up the piece at the end, but I thought that was a bit too dramatic and used the knife instead. BTW the music for this video is an unreleased piece called ‘Angry’ – all the music I’m using over the 6 videos is 100% mine.

I have no idea what I was saying in this song…’No solution’? I was indeed angry though and recorded the track one night, using Kirk’s guitar which I had borrowed for a long time. It seems to suit the doomy halloween visuals…BTW I rarely release anything with my singing or guitar as I feel too embarassed so this is a rare thing that sneaked out!

Feeling that I didn’t want to go out like that, for the penultimate prompt of ‘catch’ I did a more traditional piece in Pigma Micron with watercolour of my hand holding a baseball I found on the street ages ago. I filmed it as well:

I think that came out well, although as usual the casts from the different coloured lights we have caused problems.

Demob happy and on the final stretch there was one to go – ‘ripe’. Now I know they were probably expecting a shower of pumpkins, but I don’t eat pumpkin and don’t waste food, so I bought a pack of my favourite Braeburn Apples and drew them with a dip-pen instead. I was tempted to leave it at that – you can see the drawing above, but it felt like it needed more, so I risked an ink painting with the Bombay inks. It turned out well, although looked a bit shite when I finished.

There’s an odd thing about those inks, they look a bit dark and horrible when wet but when dry they become lighter and more clearer if that makes sense? I think they become slightly more transparent so most of the lines come back to the fore, and have a nicer more matt surface when dry. This is exactly why it made it hard to judge my first attempt in week 2 for ‘overgrown’ which came out dark.

So that’s it for Inktober!

Amazed how it’s worked out, even live on camera which I expected to have at least one ‘fail’ but it never happened. I learned a lot about techniques and developed how I can work in future and also how to film it if needed – I might do more ‘making of’ videos, I want to do those in the field (literally) if I can work out how.

I found out about the Dr PH Martin inks which have become a massive part of my work now, and indeed working on black which although I have worked on Canford paper before, never with inks or markers until this series. The first still life work in probably decades, the first ink spatter works, and my first sumi-e ink paintings.

And I proved to myself and others I could finish this and show what I can do and also challenge myself – even if sometimes the challenge is just how to avoid the obvious prompt!