When I first started the still life I had a lot of problems using ink. I have never used ink as a medium before so my greatest challenge was adjusting to how ink develops on the paper. A lot of time went to experimenting with different ink washes and figuring out how to create value rather than just line. What helped me in the end was starting with a very weak dilution of ink and adding in shadows and then adding a drop of ink to the wash and adding more shadows and after creating all the value adding texture on top. I wanted to experiment with what I could come up with organically so I didn’t try to copy anyone and I also wanted to use different tools. I took a big risk by not sketching the flowers. Instead of drawing them with line I wanted to use the plastic bag because it created a really cool texture in the previous assignment. I think it payed off because the flowers looked really cool almost like they were floating. In the critique I took away mostly that the crocheted hat didn’t read the way I wanted too, so I want to work on making it more recognizable. I also think the contrast of my objects wasn’t enough and I didn’t push the dark and light values enough. Going back I would rely more on tools I could make rather than the bamboo brushes because I think it would be a bolder approach and would have given more feeling and interesting textures to my drawing. For this still life I used vine charcoal and focused on making each object stand out from one another to get the full contrast that I wanted.
Nice reflection Casey! The vine charcoal version looks great! The contrast is and clarity is really apparent. Different mediums definitely provide different possibilities. I think the plastic bag experiments you did ending up working really well for the flowers in the ink drawing, so thanks for writing more about that here. Ambiguity and implied line can also be useful tools to work with, and sometimes capture our eyes longer than a hyper-realistic representation.