Tone, Mark and Pattern

Experimenting with mark making to create texture or tone

Smooth and Rough side by side. One of my favourite ways of making marks to indicate texture is sort of stabbing a dry brush loaded with ink or acrylic paint onto the page so that the bristles are forced to fan out aggressively. It creates almost a charred appearance and, incidentally, worked particularly well for illustrating 'rough'.


 

I also particularly liked the marks on the right in this picture (I think again for 'rough'), made by dragging a dry thick, flat head brush loaded with quite a lot of ink i short motions across the page. Due to the brush having no water on it for the ink to mix with, the ink is used up quickly within the brush stroke creating the scratchy, lighter patches.



   

I found it quite hard to focus on this task after a while to be honest and lost a fair bit of momentum. The image above ('little' and 'much') is an example of this. I was getting bored and so stopped playing around with the intention of finding new ways to work and ended up just working for the sake of it. This use of mark making is essentially just lines and i learnt nothing through doing it. A waste of time.

Draw Your dream house

I found this quite a challenging concept, especially given the short amount of time we had to do it, as I couldn't really imagine what my dream house might be, I've never given it much thought. All the traits i might look for in a real house would come together to be quite boring in the context of the task so I decided to just mess around with generally interesting ideas for housing. 

The emphasis was supposed to be on mark making and I tried a few of the previous techniques out onto fairly straightforward drawings of houses in my sketchbook. After deciding this approach was a bit boring I started to think about it in a more abstract sense and, after testing it out, decided I would essentially 'spill' ink onto the page and then blot it with paper towel. This would create, firstly, the shape of the house through the shape of the ink splodge left on the page, and, secondly, some kinds of texture or pattern inside that shape, resulting from the creases in the paper towel leaving inconsistencies in the amount of ink being lifted off the page in different areas. E.G.

I also added in details such as stilts, 3D form behind the ink blot and a window to create some similarities to a recognisable architectural structure. I was happy with this idea and though it would be interesting to create several of these large ink blots, which are out of my control in their creation, and then have the challenge of connecting them all as one coherent structure on the large sheets of paper.
Unfortunately, I found when I went to blot the ink on the sugar paper that it didn't actually blot, but instead just seeped through and bled. It perhaps should have occurred to me earlier that ink behaves very differently on different types of paper but it didn't and by this point i didn't have too much time left so i had to go with an idea I had in the sketching/ ideas phase. It was fairly simple, involving sort of stacked rectangular prisms. My final house involved several groups of these stacks in two different colours, balanced on stilts (an idea I managed to keep from my ink blot plan).

The final house. I had already put it up on the wall before I took the photo so it was taken at a weird angle and the lighting was terrible. I was fairly happy with the outcome however but wish i had made it more about mark making as I didn't end up putting enough emphasis on that due to rushing into this idea when my ink blot concept failed.