Inktober 2021: days 19-24
All of my Inktober artwork can be found on the corresponding tag, which is viewable here.
Prompt 19 was ‘Loop’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of an outer stone frame with the view through the middle of a stone slab with a Celtic cross inspired design. The frame gives the impression that you are looking at the stone slab through a window. The frame is composed of two vertical stones overlapping the horizontal ones top and bottom to form the irregular shaped opening in the centre. The stones are grey with black Celtic inspired swirls. The stone cross slab is standing on a grassy hill. The stone cross slab is an irregular coffin like shape with the Celtic cross design filling most of it. In contrast to the frame the cross slab is various tones of brown and the cross design is darker than the rest of the slab. [description end]
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I chose to paint a celtic cross slab within a stone frame. The cross slab is based on one at the Muir Of Dinnet
nature reserve in Scotland. The designs on the outer stone frame were inspired
by illustrations in a book on celtic designs, and were drawn with a black brush
pen.
Prompt 20 was ‘Sprout’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a seedling. The bottom half of the picture is a mound of bare earth rising up from the bottom left with the top of the mound just below the middle towards the right hand side of the picture. The stem of the green seedling is about 5 cm in length and 2 teardrop shaped leaves hang, one each side, of the top of the stem. Above the mound and behind the seedling is a greenish blue background with yellow, brown and white spatters [description end]
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I appreciated the broad simplicity
of the prompt, but decided to take it literally and paint a seedling sprouting
up from a mound of earth. I used Nuvo Shimmer power in the colour ‘Jade
Fountain’ to create the subtle colour behind the shoot.
Prompt 21 was ‘Fuzzy’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of water falling into a pool and of an entrance to a building. The picture is mostly orangey brown but also with some greenish blue. A waterfall takes up nearly ¾ of the height of the picture on the left hand side. It falls in a narrow column, top to bottom, into an oval pool which is inset into the ground and stretches left to right across most of the bottom third of the picture. The ground round it is brown. The rim of the pool is a greyish brown. In the top third of the picture on the right hand side is the entrance to a building. There is a triangular slab step in front of an arched doorway. There is a hint of a passageway or something through the doorway but nothing is distinct. Misty greenish blue layers, as if there is spray mist from the waterfall, drift across the front of the building adding to the fuzzy effect. [description end]
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The only thing I was certain of when I sat down to paint was
that I would depict something as seen through fog, the rest developed as I went along. The final painting is
loosely inspired by the rock-face buildings at the ancient city of Petra, in
Jordan. The piece isn't inspired by any building in particular, just by
the idea of buildings carved into rock within a dusty crevasse.
This painting also served as a technique experiment. I began
creating the ‘fog’ by applying water to areas of the painting, rubbing the
brush across the paper, and blotting it off, to try and pull up the colour.
However, this didn’t make much overall impact so I decided to try blending
distress oxide inks across the page. I chose them as they are more opaque than
the watercolour, and have a chalky finish which I hoped would add to the
‘fuzzy’ effect. This ideas had been borne in mind when creating the painting so I deliberately stuck to tones of blue and orange which would match my two oxide inkpads. The
colours I used were Tumbled Glass and Crackling Campfire.
Prompt 22 was ‘Open’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a potion bottle on a surface. The bottle has a thick rim, long neck and a bulbous shape at the bottom. It is in the centre of the picture and contains a blue liquid. A shimmery, purple, green and blue vapour is rising out of the bottle and disappearing off the top of the picture. The bottle is sat on a brown surface and the cork stopper is leaning against the bottom right hand side of the bottle. The background is a light greenish blue. [description end]
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I had considered doing a potion bottle
for two other prompts, but in the end this prompt fitted the concept best. The
addition of the Uniball Signo sparkle pens made quite a big impact on this
painting even when the sparkle isn’t visible. The bright green and purple
smudges within the liquid are from the pens, as those tones didn’t come through
in the watercolour. I also used Stickles, in the colour Stardust, to add
sparkly dots surrounding the escaping vapour.
[Image ID] photo of the painting tilted to show the sparkle effects [description end]
Prompt 23 was ‘Leak’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a leaky pipe. The pipe is in 5 greenish brown sections and bends and angles from the top right corner down to the bottom left corner, a bit like a series of elbow joints. On the top left side of the 3rd section, from the top, is a round seal or old patch and green gas is leaking out from behind it. As the gas emerges it is a narrow wisp but soon billows out into a green cloud filling most of the top left hand corner of the picture. [description end]
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Painting this pipe was quite different
to doing the ones from prompt 9 (pressure), as whilst those were fairly smooth,
I wanted this one to look worn and dented. I used the salt effect on both the
pipe and the escaping gas as it provided an effective texture.
Prompt 24 was ‘Extinct’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a fossil. The focal point filling the centre of the picture is a piece of irregular shaped, greyish rock with an ammonite in it. The ground it is stood on is brown, including a few large pebbles, leading down to a small strip of water at the very bottom of the picture. Green grass and weeds are growing round the pebbles and also create a ground level frame round the fossil rock.
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Painting a fossil seemed an obvious
choice, and I settled on a small fragment of rock containing an Ammonite. The
ground it is sat upon is intended to be the sandy bank of a river.