Inktober 2021: days 25-31
This is the final set of my Inktober paintings for 2021. I have learnt a lot from participating again this year, and I managed to also achieve my secondary goal of ending up with 31 A4 watercolour paintings.
The rest of the paintings can be found on the Inktober tag,
which is viewable here.
Prompt 25 was ‘Splat’.
-
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of an ink blot. A brown surface that could be a table or a desk, fills the bottom two thirds of the picture. On the top right hand side of that surface is a see through glass bottle half full of ink. A brown ink pen stretches across the surface from left to right. The pen nib is a dirty gold colour. Beneath the pen nib is a piece of paper on which there is a large greyish blue ink blot. [description end]
-
I had really struggled to find an interpretation of this prompt
that I felt like painting until the idea of an ink splat was pointed out to me.
With that in mind I decided on painting a fountain pen and ink bottle beside a
piece of paper with an ink splat on it.
Prompt 26 was ‘connect’.
[Image ID] Watercolour landscape painting. On the left hand side a wooden 3 fingered fingerpost, footpath sign, extends from the bottom corner ¾ of the way up the picture. The landscape is hilly and a grey path winds from the fingerpost up and over a hill to the right. Tall blades of grass surround the bottom of the fingerpost and green bushes stretch out, in various places, from the path onto the hillside. The sky is slightly cloudy and is greyish blue.[description end]
-
Paths connect one place to another, so I chose to paint a
footpath sign and the path it gives directions for.
Prompt 27 was ‘Spark’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a hammer and an anvil. The picture depicts something being actively shaped on an anvil. The anvil and the head of the hammer are grey. The handle of the hammer is a brownish grey. The narrow piece of metal that is being shaped is grey at the end where it would be held and is an orangey brown at the end on the anvil. Different sized strokes and spattering in orange and gold depict the sparks that fly when hot metal is shaped on an anvil.[description end]
-
The prompt word immediately made me think of a smithy, so I
depicted an anvil and hammer shaping hot metal.
Prompt 28 was ‘Crispy’.
[Image ID] Watercolour wintry landscape. The grey sky has a pinkish orange glow just above the horizon. The foreground is a snowy scene with a bare tree either side of what looks like a path heading off into the mist. There are frozen bits of snow on some of the tree branches and on the snow mounds at the base of the trunks. [description end]
-
My thought process for this piece began with the idea of a
‘crisp frost’. The painting itself changed greatly during the process as I put
some salt on, left it to dry, and when I returned it looked totally different!
The salt really made the scene though, as it produced the fractal-like markings
in the foreground.
Prompt 29 was ‘Patch’.
-
[Image ID] Watercolour painting depicting a tent and campfire. The sky has a purple hue. The front corner of a blue tent takes up most of the left side of the picture. There is a large brown patch in the top right hand corner of the side of the tent. The tent flaps are closed and the ridge pole sticks out a short way above the door flaps. In front of the tent is a lit campfire with golden flames.[description end]
-
There were many ways I could have interpreted this prompt, but a campsite with a patched up tent was the one which stood out to me.
[Image ID] photo of the painting tilted to show the sparkle effects [description end]
Prompt 30 was ‘Slither’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a snake and some toadstools with thin slithers for stalks. The snake is drawn in a cute stylised way and is brown with a cream front. Its forked tongue is pink. It is in the middle of the picture slithering across a mossy log towards the toadstools which have pointed umbrella style caps. The background behind is blue.[description end]
-
I’d originally tried to avoid painting a snake, as the
thought of doing a more realistic one didn’t appeal to me. Eventually I worked
out a way to stylise it so it was both simple to create, and cute.
The final prompt was ‘risk’.
[Image ID] Watercolour painting of a broken ice sheet with an intense storm above. The stormy sky is greyish blue with clouds coming in from the top right and covering most of the sky. The ice sheet has a single jagged crack down the middle revealing a section of dark blue water below that is being blown about in the wind. In a few places round the edge of the water there are lines to suggest the beginning of further fractures and the fragility of the ice.[description end]
-
I googled synonyms and the phrase ‘on thin ice’ came up,
which I then used as the inspiration for my painting. I imagined a stormy gale
in the arctic, where the water in the crack is being visibly sloshed about by
the raging wind. Although mostly watercolour and pen, I also used Distress
Oxide (Tumbled Glass) to create ‘mist/haze’ like I did for Fuzzy.